Butcher T brought New York style hip hop DJing to Montreal, and provided musical accompaniment on Canada’s first urban music radio show alongside Michael Williams on CKGM’s Club 980 in Montreal.

“A friend of mine named Andrew Carr (the nephew of Howard ‘Stretch’ Carr) is from New York, and he used to come down to Montreal in the summertime. He was the one that introduced me to hip hop, and in the early 80′s, he was the one who said I had to check out the way the DJs in New York were playing the beats and breaks, using two records to extend the breakbeat. Grandmaster Flash and Grandmaster D.S.T. were the ones to watch at the time. I remember the main beat was Billy Squier’s “Big Beat” and Chic’s “Good Times” break. At the time I only had a Lloyd system with one turntable, a radio tuner and a 8-track cassette deck, so I hooked up another cassette recorder and I would record the breakbeat, pause it, pull the record back and record it again, and I would do this over and over to extend the beat. My friend used to say “you’re a butcher!” and that’s how the name Butcher T came about. I would put these tapes on a (boom)box, go down to the park and let people hear my work. I had a lot of the records, like the James Brown stuff and a lot of rock records actually, but I remember going to buy Grace Jones and bunch of music that I didn’t have. I never had them all. Eventually I got two Pioneer turntables, a mixer, and started to practice, and along the way I got the knack of things. I started doing house parties on the South Shore in Chateauguay where I met up with a guy named Shan Wan. He was Trinidadian but very Americanized, and asked if he could get on the mic. I said yes, and when I would do my thing extending the beat and doing my little ‘ziggz-zigga’ scratches, he would come in rapping–right on time! It was all about the rapper and the DJ playing together, and it was only because I was going back and forth to New York that I was able to bring that style to Montreal. That’s how they did it, and we were doing it too. As these parties started to pick up and I got more popular, DJ Ray, who I had known for a long time but never associated with, started to get on the mic with me too. Shan Wan and DJ Ray both knew Michael Williams and would sometimes rap on tracks recorded for his radio show, so they took me to the station and introduced me to him. We hooked up good, he liked the style that I was playing which was a mix of rap, r n’b, disco and some other stuff. I ended up joining him on the Club 980 show on CKGM, and used to do master-mixes for the show. Mike ended up applying for a job at Muchmusic when it was first starting out in Toronto, and he got the job of course. When he wasn’t there I was mixing the shows and getting on the mic in his place. On Club 980 you had rap, r n’b and funk, reggae and more from 6 p.m. to midnight on a Saturday night. There were no other stations that were giving you six hours of urban music in the city. Mike Williams was traveling back and forth from Montreal to Toronto holding down both jobs for a while, and I was still DJing on Club 980 every week, but eventually CKGM turned the page on the format that we had enjoyed for so long. Here in Montreal, I’ve always just done my own thing, and I’ve always been known for playing different stuff, and even though I was given a Stylus DJ achievement award back in 2006, I’m still just doing my thing.”

—Inteviewed by: Scott C

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