As far as record cities go, Los Angeles can feel like an enigma. The size and diversity of its population, in addition to long-standing music and movie industries, means that many meaningful sides were both cut and distributed here, but the geographic size and population dispersion have long frustrated those trying to explore the region’s record riches. It takes time, patience, and a lot of footwork to get anywhere in that game, and if anyone has worn some soles, hunting for soul, it’s been Thes One (Chris Portugal).
As the hip-hop duo known as People Under the Stairs, Thes and his late partner Double K (Michael Turner), laid down a distinct brand of music-making rooted in the traditions of sample-based producers like the Beatnuts and Pete Rock. Constant digging is practically a requirement of that ethos (Thes’s 2023 instrumental tribute to Double K, Farewell, My Friend, partly highlights records the two men came up on together that would make their way into their music). Yet, as fiercely committed as PUTS was to their music-making craft, they did so with an irrepressible irreverence. Just because they took their music seriously doesn’t mean they took themselves as seriously.
I learned this first hand when the group released their third studio LP, O.S.T. in 2002. Whilst listening to the song “The Outrage” I came upon this little line aimed straight at me from Double K: “I got a piece under the seat for any Oliver mark-ass Twang.” As I learned later, the group had been unhappy with my review of their previous album, Question In the Form of a Answer (2000) and they chose to express that displeasure directly. If anything, I was flattered as it was my first time being dissed on a record (the first of three times total), and PUTS followed it up with a hilarious personal gift: an autographed vinyl copy of O.S.T. where Thes used a Sharpie to paint a gun into his hand and wrote beneath, “take [redacted] the way you give it…”
Fast forward roughly five years. I had recently relocated back to Los Angeles and was hanging at a record swap in Culver City, chatting with a couple of folks. One person looked familiar but I couldn’t place why. After we talked for a while, he eyed me warily and stuck out his hand: “hi, Thes One.” He clearly knew who I was and while shaking his hand, I wasn’t sure what would happen next but there was no piece under the seat for me that day. Instead, Thes and I ended up becoming good friends and over the years we’ve had many a conversation about music and records. This interview for Dust & Grooves simply marks the latest one.
"I never cared as much about the records as I enjoyed the adventure, I enjoyed meeting people, I enjoyed the community. Having the record without the story almost felt incomplete."
What is your first memory of being interested in a record?
When Big Daddy Kane’s “I’ll Take You There” came out. The original Staple Singers’ song [that Kane’s song sampled] was a 45 my dad loved. He would play it all the time. So when I heard the Big Daddy Kane song on KDAY, I ran downstairs into my dad’s closet, put [the 45] on and was like, “oh my god.” It all kind of clicked. That was the moment when I understood sampling. I was 10 or 11. Then I started going through all his records and I started hearing other samples.
You grew up in San Pedro which, for those who don’t know, is part of the city of L.A., located on a peninsula at the southwestern tip. Every time I visit, it feels like an island, like you’re some place that is L.A. yet not L.A. I’m wondering if growing up there shaped your relationship to music and records?
Absolutely, absolutely. If you’re going to talk about Pedro, you have to start with the Minutemen and what they brought to punk, or what JDC Records brought to hip-hop, signing Ice-T very early on. The common thread between Pedro hip-hop and Pedro punk was that “yeah, we’re isolated, and because of that, we’re going to do for ourselves.” Our goal was not to get signed by some Hollywood label, the goal was like, “let’s press up cassette tapes and put them in the shop down the street.”
