When DJ Shadow was still Josh Davis, a fourteen-year-old hip-hop fanatic living in Davis, California, his favorite DJ was a guy named Big O, the Ultimate Gigolo. Big O spun at the local college station, KDVS, beginning every show with the Time's "Gigolos Get Lonely Too." Davis listened obsessively, dialing up Big O so often that the two became friends. When the Def Jam rap tour came to Oakland in 1988, Big O agreed to take Davis, who had to plead with his parents to go. After the show, they hung out in the lobby of the Holiday Inn, where Davis met Public Enemy's Flavor Flav, who was running around playing an advance copy of It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back on a Muppet Babies boombox.

As they were leaving, in the parking lot, a local rapper tried to sell Davis his record. "MC Chocolate Milk," Shadow recalls today. "I was like, 'No, man, I'm cool.' " He shakes his head and half-smiles. "It took me forever, but I finally found that record last year. The guy had probably only made 200 copies. But Oakland hip-hop back then was hot, you know? I couldn't just let it go."

Which raises the question: After a search lasting approximately thirteen years, was it worth the effort?

Shadow chuckles sheepishly. "You know what?" he admits. "It wasn't that dope."

Thirteen years tracking down one piece of not terribly dope vinyl. It's precisely that level of dedication -- some would say obsession -- that makes Shadow one of the best DJs, both technically and creatively, working today. It's lunchtime at the Tribeca Grand, a trendy hotel in New York, and Shadow is working on a plate of pad thai in the lobby restaurant. He has neatly cropped red hair -- matching his equally trim sideburns and goatee -- and striking blue eyes. His outfit is far less striking: It includes a chunky black digital watch and a gray LRG T-shirt. Shadow, 30, has come to the city to perform a couple of shows in support of his second album, The Private Press. The title refers to private pressings, personalized discs recorded in old make-your-own-record booths and studios that were popular in the Fifties and Sixties. Shadow samples a couple of private-press recordings on the album -- scratchy audio letters that sound disembodied, haunted -- but the title, more broadly, is suggestive of Shadow's own approach to making music. Shadow makes the type of records that he and other vinyl freaks live to discover: something private, something one-of-a-kind, something none of your friends have ever heard of, something your very own.

Shadow's 1996 debut, Entroducing . . . -- a moody, mostly instrumental hip-hop collage -- offered a revolutionary new way to make pop music. Shadow constructs songs entirely from sampled snippets of other songs. His only instruments are his turntable and his sampler. Since then, others have worked similar magic with old recordings -- Moby did so in the most high-profile fashion on Play -- but Shadow showed how far you can go.

On The Private Press, "Six Days" combines wind whistles, a faint, stuttering drumbeat, a sampled vocal from Colonel Bagshot -- a forgotten British psychedelic band -- and what sounds like an off-key harp. The frantically syncopated "Mono-sylabik" is built entirely from two bars of a song that Shadow spent months breaking down and reworking.

In conversation, Shadow is as serious and methodical as his songs, and quite single-mindedly focused on music. As a kid, he shuttled back and forth between his parents, who separated when he was two. His mom is a teacher; his dad works in commercial design. "The first records I can remember imprinting my own identity onto were disco," Shadow recalls. "The first song where I wanted to go out and buy the 45 was 'Funkytown' by Lipps, Inc. I liked music that sounded futuristic, that had robot voices and laser sounds, all that stuff."

Then he discovered hip-hop. "It was like truth on wax," Shadow says. "It was unstoppable." Shadow's father would drive him the hour and a half to San Francisco's Pier 39, where they'd watch the break dancers and he'd memorize the hooks of songs booming from their boxes, so he could find them later at the record store.

Though he had been DJ'ing in his bedroom since he was twelve, Shadow didn't see many career options after high school. He considered going out on the club-DJ circuit but ended up in college at UC-Davis, where he majored in communications (thanks to Kool Moe Dee, who, Shadow recalls, mentioned that he'd been a comm major on Yo! MTV Raps). At school, he had an epiphany. He still remembers the date: November 1st, 1990.

"It was Halloween," Shadow says. "I say November 1st, because it was probably two in the morning. I was sitting around the dorm room. You know, one guy had a little hat he'd made out of a twelve-pack of beer. He was sitting there dribbling on himself. I was drunk. Someone else was throwing up. And I suddenly felt really guilty, because I was supposed to be making music that night, and instead I'd stayed in the dorm and was getting fucked up. And I went, 'I have a job to do.' I remember going to my room, trying to sober up and thinking about what I'd do the next time I had an opportunity to make music. I pretty much stopped drinking at that point. I mean, I'll still drink on occasion, and I didn't make it a big issue. It just had to do with the fact that music overrided everything else."

These days, Shadow feels like he's just hitting his stride. "I only started making big steps, mentally, around '99," he says. "It has to do with the way I look at my instrument. You can get caught up in how to scratch faster, but it's not about better or faster. It's about being different. It's like playing the bass and, you know, somebody deciding to slap it. It's the same old instrument, but a new way of thinking about it."

Specifically, Shadow wants to delve deeper into musical history. "For example, psychedelic music?" he says. "I've always used it as a tool. But I made no effort to understand the music I was using. I'm trying to get deeper than the crazy backward guitars and the cool clothes. I want to get into the social reasons of why it was popular then, why it was possible then, in the same way I've been so fascinated with hip-hop all my life. I feel like a photographer. You know, I've always looked at every song I do through a hip-hop lens. Now I'm trying to vary my lens."

[From Issue 904 — September 5, 2002]