How many hours of music do you think you have in your archives?

Just stuff that I've done? Man, I've got a tremendously big box of DATs (digital audio tape). I told my mom, "God forbid, but if I leave this earth? All this equipment is worth nothing. This box right here? This is the money. What's on these DAT tapes are the money."

I do so many now that I lost track. The thing about the technology now is that you become somewhat unfocused because you're able to do something, take it down, work on something else. Just with my House stuff, let me click on my folder... I have 194 tracks! Out of 194, probably 20 of those are ready to go to record. The rest of them, I'll go back when I get writer's block and start pulling out stuff... "Okay, that's alright, let me take this and re-work it." For me, it has become too easy. It's fun, don't get me wrong. It's a new love. I guess I can call myself one of the older cats now, and it brings excitement back to making music, like having new toys that you just want to sit there and play with all day.

You did Dance Mutha Records, Muzique... were there any other labels you did?

I also did Warehouse Records - that was Armando's label but I helped a lot. He needed help and I was there for him, the same as he was for me. We worked it out so Dance Mutha was mine, Warehouse was his, and Muzique was ours.

There's really no overhead to starting a label if you wanted to bypass vinyl or use it for promo rather than for sale. Do you think you'll get back into that game?

Oh yeah, that's coming. I was talking the other day with Roy Davis, Jr. - we're getting ready to do a record together and he was asking me about that. What I need to do now is just focus on getting my name back out there. So I've been working a lot on other people's labels - RobSoul, Defected, T's Box...

What happened is I got in touch with Traxsource.com awhile ago, and I was going to do it but then I looked on Traxsource and saw like 17,000 labels! I'm thinking, I'll get lost in the storm unless big records come out with the other stuff I'm doing and people start looking for it. When you get on Traxsource, you're basically looking for what you already know - DopeWax, Vega, Defected, Strictly... you know what I'm saying? You have your picks that you're looking for first. Then you might back up and look through the top 10 downloads and check some new stuff out. You have your faves but you might luck up with something you've never heard of before. You're taking a chance.

Three and a half years ago, it was really exclusive stuff. Now it's wide open and loaded with labels. You'll get lost in the storm unless you have big name friends, DJs who play it and tell other people what it is. Fortunately I do have those resources.

What was crazy was that Tuesday I was spinning at the Reynolds and Ron Carroll came in. He's like, "Man, I was in Amsterdam, they're beatin' this track of yours and I've got to have it." Guess what track it was? "The Boy Beats on His Drum!"

The one we had on our Miami sampler! Did you put that out anywhere else?

Yeah, the same song, and no, it's just on the sampler. They had to get it from the Winter Music Conference and brought it back home. Ron's telling me and I'm like, damn, Amsterdam? He's like, "These guys are going crazy, I need to have this track!" That goes to show you how fast this travels now. My wifey, Patricia, loves that track. She's more into the old school, soul, R+B, classics and all of that. She listens to some of the new House stuff - she loves the Nathalie Cole remix.

Are you going to put it out?

Yeah, somebody will play it and they'll call or they'll call you and you'll call me. We'll just let it grow legs on its own.

While we're talking about tracks, I know there's a story behind why you never released "Phreaky MF". It was one of the biggest tracks for a couple of years - why was it never released on its own?

My grandmother (R.I.P.) - or "Big Ma" as we called her - raised me all my teen years growing up. I'd go to church every Sunday, a good boy - doing the bad stuff, sure, but around her being the perfect grandson. So she heard it, her nice boy making this nasty song, and she freaked. So I said I wouldn't put it out on its own as long as she was with us. It actually did come out on a compilation on Hula's Club House label, but nobody got it because Hula did a lot of rap and R+B at the time. Eventually it was bootlegged and became a classic, but was still hard to find.

I think one of the reasons it became a classic is because of the lyrics. I never said the B word, or H, or W or whatever - it was a compliment to the women. The women loved it because it didn't call them every name in the book. I just started performing that song around the middle of 2007. I'd only performed it once before then.

Out of all of those tracks - "Phreaky MF", "God Made Me Phunky", "So Let it Be House" - are there any that you just can't hear anymore?

Nah, it's not like that. A track may have been out twenty years and you might not want to play it in every set or at all, but I understand how it is. It's like hiring Byron Stingily and he's not gonna sing "Devotion". Steve Hurley: you've got to do "Jack Your Body". Those are the songs that people fell in love with and it takes them back, so I understand but... Man, I listen to myself and I listen to them and my voice sounds like a little boy!

Yeah, your voice was a lot higher then!

Yeah, I guess smokin' cigars made my voice a lot deeper! But seriously, those records have a lot of memories for some people. Listening to them, they bring people back to a time and they bring me back to a time, and I wouldn't trade those times for nothing.

You've done a lot of stuff that people don't know about - like I just happened to find an old bio for Ron Carroll from years back, and saw that you, Ron and Byron Stingily were "Deep Soul Productions" and did half of Byron's album. You don't throw your name all over just for the sake of it - come to think of it, half the time you don't even use your full name.

Yeah, it's either MD or an alias. That's always been me. I come from the old school and what was taught to me was that the person behind it, the one you don't see... is usually the richest person! [laughs]

But yeah, I love putting other people on and helping them put their dreams and ideas out. I could tell you I did this and that and so on... But I can just say for the person reading this magazine that I've done a lot of things people would say, "What? You did that?" But I won't take away from another person's shine. People who are close to me know what I've done and what I've been involved with in terms of stuff that doesn't have my name on it. Maybe when you all do a "Dirt" issue we'll bring it all out. [laughs]

Speaking of dirt, you were around in that era when Trax and DJ International were huge. A lot of people still have raw emotions about business deals gone wrong in those days.

A lot of people who say they got screwed by Trax or DJ International just look like the oldest people now... They let it get to them and it becomes their whole life. You have to move on. We didn't get a lot of money but we were able to stay in the game and piggyback off of that and get gigs and travel the world without having to join the army or something like that.

Like I said, I wouldn't trade those times for nothing. Every day at DJ International wasn't a bad day. Every day at Trax wasn't a bad day. People will say, "Ah, Larry screwed us!" or "Rocky screwed us!" But there were times I saw Rocky write artists $10,000 checks. I only dealt with Larry a few times (well, other than going out in back and stealing records out of the garbage!) I dealt more with Rocky. He may have had some bad business discussions, but he was a good person. Some didn't get paid some of the time, and we didn't get paid what we felt like we should have gotten paid, but nobody put out a record and didn't get anything. Not unless there was some third party stuff going on... like if you were an artist and Rocky paid the producer but they didn't pay you. Rocky kept me in the game - period!

It was Tyree that introduced me to DJ International. I'd seen the success of "I Fear the Night" and I couldn't believe that record was doing as well as it was doing. Back in the day we used to hang out on Rush Street, and people were playing their stereos, playing WBMX and you heard that song everywhere.

You have to remember, if these songs didn't do anything - and some of them didn't - the labels lost. Only when they did well, which the label may have had a lot or even everything to do with - did you hear griping. I didn't understand at the time either, but when I started my own company and was doing the rap thing, I finally got the other side of it. I paid people a lot of dough and it still wasn't enough. It's better to take less of an advance early and get more money later, but we looked at it as, "Damn, let me get my money now!"

The masters are the key to the game. That's it. Every couple of years, I get a check that I'm like, "Where did this come from?"