Stereogum contributor Al Shipley has written his first book, Tough Breaks: The Story of Baltimore Club Music, which will be published by Repeater Books on Aug. 19. Incorporating over 50 interviews conducted over the last 19 years, the book examines how Maryland’s biggest city became a hotbed for a unique fusion of house music and hip hop that’s influenced and been sampled by mainstream stars like Cardi B, Drake, Kanye West, Pharrell Williams, and M.I.A.

The following excerpt draws from the sixth and seventh chapters of the book, which focus on the early ’90s origins of Baltimore club’s longest running label, Unruly Records, which is still active today, and one of the scene’s most important clubs, the Paradox, which concluded its 25-year run in 2016. The story of how Unruly got its name, and who came up with it, has never been published before.

To get you up to speed on the events of the first five chapters: Baltimore had fallen in love with dance music at Odell’s, a club founded by Odell Brock Jr. in 1976 where the club’s main DJ, Wayne Davis, cultivated an eclectic mix of disco, new wave, and eventually the house music that was coming out of Chicago. Brock died of cancer in 1984. and Odell’s continued to operate under different owners until closing in 1993, while Davis founded the short-lived Club Fantasy and house music thrived at other clubs like Godfrey’s Famous Ballroom, the Body Factory, and Club Ozone.

Thommy Davis and DJ Equalizer had released some of Baltimore’s first homegrown house records in the late ’80s, and local producers were quickly latching on a few signature breakbeats from ’70s funk and disco records, most prominently “Think (About It)” by Lyn Collins (the famous “Ya Bad Sister” loop) and “Sing Sing” by Gaz, to create a style that was uniquely Baltimore. One of the city’s most popular radio personalities, Frank Ski, formed the group 2 Hyped Brothers & A Dog and released Baltimore club’s first national hit, “Doo Doo Brown,” which crossed over to MTV and Billboard’s Hot 100. But the genre continued to evolve at an underground level, on 12″ singles that could at first only be found at local stores like Music Liberated and Inner City Records, which had launched its own label.

Soon after “Doo Doo Brown,” the first official Inner City Records Co. 12″ was released under Equalizer’s alias, Sounds of Silence, featuring three songs that Equalizer and DJ Scottie B. created together (the latter credited as “D.J. Scotty B.”). The three breakbeat-heavy songs ranged from 118 BPM to 130 BPM, evidence that Baltimore club had not yet settled into a uniform tempo. Both “All About Pussy” and “Much Too Much” featured 2 Live Crew–style samples of the enthusiastic moans of adult film actresses – the former also featured excerpts of a profane routine by Andrew “Dice” Clay, the massively popular New York comedian who was headlining arenas in the early ’90s.

The slower and less risque lead track on the Equalizer and Scottie 12″ “I Got the Rhythm” wound up being the biggest hit from the release. After all, it was the only one that wasn’t too lewd for public broadcasting. “Next thing you know, Frank Ski was playing the living shit out of it on the radio,” Equalizer says. “He was a tremendous promoter of music.”

Not long after Scottie B. made his on-record debut with “I Got the Rhythm,” Shawn Caesar made his first appearance on wax with “Booty Mission (Yo, Yo Where The Ho’s At?),” a boom bap hip hop track released under the group name Runaway Slaves. The single was released by the well-funded but short-lived label Savage Records and distributed by BMG – Shawn Caesar was, however briefly, labelmates with David Bowie. A video for “Booty Mission” was produced, Caesar went on a promotional tour in the UK, and the 12″ single featured a remix by Salaam Remi, who would begin producing mainstream hits for Ini Kamoze and the Fugees within a couple of years.

At the time, Scottie B. was working at Inner City Records, and Caesar was working at DJ’s Outlet at Old Town Mall alongside Marc Henry and Sean Marshall. “We were battling to see who could sell more of the other’s record,” Caesar told the Baltimore Sun in 2016. “[Scottie] had a better record store situation than I did, so he sold more copies of my record than I sold of his.”

Now that Caesar and Scottie B. had both gotten a taste of making a record and hearing their ideas on wax, they decided to team up. “I did one, then he did one, and then we were like, ‘Alright, we’re ready to do this together,'” Scottie B. says. At first, they branded themselves as the Underground Trak Team, but soon they decided to start a label together, co-founding it with Baltimore house producer Christopher “Karizma” Clayton, born in 1970.

I’d interviewed Scottie B. numerous times over the last 18 years before it occurred to me one day, toward the end of working on this book, to ask Scottie who actually came up with the name of Unruly Records. I’d always assumed that the idea came from one of the label’s three co-founders. To my surprise, he volunteered that the name came from a friend, Tierre Brownlee, with whom he frequently DJed in clubs at the time. “Tierre used to say little catchphrases, he used to always say, ‘Man, they’re getting unruly in here,'” Scottie remembers.

One day, Scottie B., Caesar, and Brownlee were hanging out, and began brainstorming for a label name. “We were sitting there, it was us three in my room, and we were like, ‘We gotta come up with a name for this shit.’ And then he just popped up like, ‘Unruly motherfuckin’ Records,’ and we looked at each other like, ‘That’s it. That’s it.'”

The day after Scottie told me that story, I had an interview scheduled with DJ Tie.Be. And until he began telling me the same story, I didn’t realize that he was Tierre Brownlee, who went by DJ Tierre in the ’90s. “We was up on Labyrinth Road, in the little apartment he had. He would make stuff in his little studio, that’s where me, him, and Shawn sat on crates in his studio and Unruly was born,” says Brownlee, born in 1972.

Brownlee’s creativity and over-the-top personality also manifested in a quirky ritual he started while hanging out at the Inner City Records location on Howard Street with Scottie B. The track for the Baltimore Light Rail system, the public transit used by many commuters to get downtown, ran right past the front of the store. “I would DJ in the record store,” Brownlee remembers. “If the record was hot, I’d go out there and touch the third rail. They’d be like, ‘Yo, what you doin’?’ I’m goin’ out and touchin’ the third rail because it’s a hot record! You know what I’m sayin’? It was just somethin’ that I did.” (Please note that touching the third rail, which provides electricity to the trains, is extremely dangerous and not recommended.)

Brownlee DJed house music at Club Ozone with DJ Cornbread, warming up the crowd for Scottie B. Brownlee also made mixtapes and frequently played parties with DJ Paradise. But between a stint in the U.S. Army and getting a day job to provide for his family, Brownlee never devoted himself full time to music like his friends at Unruly Records, and he never released anything on the label he named. “When they started really pressing records, I was workin’, I was nine to five. I love the music still, but I was a taxpayer, I was locked in, I had to take care of them kids, man, you know how that is,” he says. “I’m not bashin’ nobody, but I wish I woulda had paperwork to say who I was and what I did.”

Initially, Unruly was conceived primarily as a vehicle for tracks by the founders of the label. “We wanted to put out our records at first,” Scottie says. Pretty quickly, however, Unruly began releasing tracks by many of the scene’s best producers, including DJ Class, DJ Technics, DJ Booman, and K.W. Griff.

Unruly averaged eight to ten releases a year, primarily 12″ EPs with two or a handful of songs. And the label’s brand eventually became strong enough that the Unruly name sometimes meant more than the individual artist or song on a Baltimore shop’s wall display of new releases. “After a while, the label had a visual print, so people would go to the record store and they would see the black and yellow, and they were like, ‘I wanna hear this,'” says Scottie B, adding that the color scheme was picked out by the more detail-oriented Caesar. “I didn’t care. If it would’ve been me, it wouldn’t have even had the label. I didn’t even think about shit like that. He thinks about shit like that.”

Unruly also began introducing sublabels, including Hardhead Records, heralded as “the son of Unruly” on 12″ labels, which had its own color scheme. “[Hardhead] was the white label with the red lettering, so you would see a lot of those in record stores. Soon as you saw it on the wall you would just grab it, because you knew it was somethin’ hot. And it was always either us or [DJ] Technics, or [DJ] Kool Breeze, or [DJ] Excel, [DJ Big] Red, Karizma,” Griff remembers. DJ Excel, born in 1976, was still a teenager when he released “This DJ” and “Captain Jack” on a Hardhead 12″ in 1995.

In 1995, the Baltimore rapper Sparrow released his debut single “Physics” on Unruly, a record that has become highly sought after by the international community of collectors of ’90s underground hip hop. “That gets like five to eight hundred dollars a pop on vinyl now,” Scottie B. says. Sparrow’s list of thank-yous on the “Physics” 12″ included Labtekwon, another underground Baltimore rapper who’d already begun building his prodigious catalog of self-released albums.

“We were thinking like Unruly was gonna be house and hip hop,” Scottie B. says, with Hardhead created primarily for a third genre that didn’t have a definite name yet, the music that would eventually be called Baltimore club. For a while, Unruly had its own Friday-night DJ block on V103, designed to showcase those three genres. “I played the club, Karizma played house, Shawn played hip hop, and we played an hour each.”

Karizma made a few of the best early Unruly tracks, including “Kong” and “Mamakossa,” but his direct involvement in running the label was relatively short-lived. Karizma was more connected to the global house music mainstream alongside the Basement Boys, which he joined in the mid-’90s, and he was soon in high demand as a DJ around the world, while the club music faction of Unruly stayed focused on the Baltimore market.

Tierre Brownlee speaks of Karizma with a sense of awe and respect in his voice. “True story, I see Karizma, and he just came from, I think he was in Australia or somewhere. And I see this motherfucker walkin’ up Saratoga Street and he got Gucci flip-flops on. I’m like, yo! Because that’s when he was doing shit with Pioneer, he was traveling, he was on tour, he was in Tokyo, all this kinda stuff. And I’m walkin’ up Saratoga Street, and I’m like, is that fuckin’ Karizma?”

With the other two founders left to guide Unruly for most of its history, Scottie B. and Shawn Caesar became one of Baltimore club’s iconic duos. In a sense, Baltimore club’s top label being run by one White man and one Black man was emblematic of how the scene was built by an interracial mix of DJs and producers. It also created a parallel to hip hop’s most important label, Def Jam, and its founders, Rick Rubin and Russell Simmons.

The dynamic between the heads of Unruly ran counter to what one might expect given their respective races. Scottie B. spun more hip hop while Caesar leaned more towards house. Scottie B. was constantly active on the club scene and focused on the music, while Caesar was increasingly putting in office hours to run the label’s day-to-day business. “It was kind of like a strategy: I would stay out there, and Shawn would stay in there,” Scottie B. says.

“Scottie already had a reputation for playing for Black crowds,” Brownlee says, noting that some nights Scottie B. may have been the only White person in the club. “I ain’t seen no [other] White people in the Ozone, unless they’re the police and they was outside.”

“Scottie took me to some places that I was like, ‘Yo, I’m scared!’ He’s White, and I’m scared! ‘Nah, they cool, yo, they cool,'” Brownlee says with a laugh. “He’s a human being, that’s my brother, and I love him. Scottie is who he is. If you wanna say ‘hood pass,’ Scottie had a pass before the pass was the pass.”

In the wake of the success of “Doo Doo Brown,” the song’s title became a shorthand for the dance tracks coming out of Baltimore. “I remember at some point somebody callin’ it’doo dew music,’ they were tryin’ to give club a name,” DJ Booman says. He, K.W. Griff, and Jimmy Jones released much of their music under the group name Doo Dew Kidz, which later became the name of their label. For years, songs that didn’t even contain the 2 Live Crew sample had names like “Doo Dew Rock,” which was a Dukeyman track that remixed Michael Jackson’s “Rock with You.”

“They used to call it ‘knucklehead music,’ then club music,” DJ Patrick recalls. “The name started changing, because it wasn’t gettin’ no radio play, it was all in the club.” In 1996, DJ Technics created an Unruly sublabel called Knucklehead Records, which would release music by Dukeyman, Rod Lee, Karizma, Jimmy Jones, DJ Boobie, and others. Music Liberated owner Bernie Rabinowitz had a label called Baltimore Breakbeat Records, and Baltimore breakbeat and Baltimore breaks were widely used names for the genre for years – even the Philadelphia store 611 Records had a vinyl bin labeled “Baltimore breaks” in the ’90s.

Liaison Records, based in Laurel, Maryland, distributed a number of Baltimore club labels, including Unruly, Inner City, and Deco. DJ Equalizer remembers a fateful conversation with the distributor when he was releasing a best-of EP in the mid-’90s. “Tom Goldfogle from Liaison, he gave me a call. And he’s like, ‘Bob, look, y’know, I keep getting these calls from overseas, they wanna know where they can hear more of that Baltimore club music.’ That right there is the moment that God made club music, that was the exact moment.”

Both Fantasy and Godfrey’s closed down in the early ’90s. Godfrey’s had been neighbors with a movie theater, the Charles Theatre, and eventually the space that housed Godfrey’s became part of an expansion of the Charles.

Because Fantasy was essentially a converted rowhouse in a residential area, it was shut down by city government, which became a learning experience for Wayne Davis. “That was my first time as a partner with ownership. The [co-owner] had the place already set up, with me not knowing what type of licensing was required,” he says. “We were forced out of the city because of the complaints they were getting about the music [volume] level. They started messing with us, and eventually found in the zoning that the permitted use was not what we were using the building as.”

In 1991, Wayne Davis opened the Paradox in a warehouse space at 1310 Russell Street, which would become arguably the definitive Baltimore dance club over the next 25 years. More conventional house music thrived at the Paradox, particularly Scott Henry and Charles Feelgood’s long-running Thursday-night party, Fever. But on the weekends it was the place where homegrown Baltimore club tracks became the local classics that DJs still play to this day.

Davis kept an open mind, to a point, about the newer, more aggressive sounds that those DJs brought into the Paradox, increasingly tracks they’d produced themselves. If nothing else, Davis understood that it was what people were coming to his club to hear. “My roots were more with what evolved into house music. The hip hop and the Baltimore club music was not anything that I was attracted to, but it was [popular] for the crowd, so I dealt with it in that perspective. I wasn’t that much involved in the creativity of it,” he says.

The Paradox, a 13,000-square-foot concrete box, was far more spacious than the 300-capacity Fantasy. “Our legal capacity of the Paradox was really like 800 or something, but we’ve had way more, and it was still comfortable with a thousand people in there. When you would start getting over 1200, then it would start getting a little crowded,” Davis says.

Davis came up with the name of the Paradox as a reference to the contrast between the club’s anonymous industrial exterior and the lively nights of music that took place inside it. “I’d read what a paradox was and I thought of the warehouse, it looked like an empty warehouse and you go in and it’s a club,” he says. “And then I liked the sound of it. I was thinking of something that would have a ring to it.”

With the experience of Fantasy’s shutdown fresh in his mind, Davis made smarter decisions from the beginning to ensure the Paradox’s longevity. “I learned from that to make sure that when I went to open the Paradox, I played the game, gettin’ all my proper paperwork and stuff like that,” he says.

“When I went to the zoning board, I told them what my intended use for the building was, and I was told this would be sufficient to do what I want to do. Then a storage place down in the Camden Yards area around the corner from us started complaining about the crowds and stuff. So we had to have a hearing, and as a result of the hearing, we came out stronger than we went in, we were granted a legal after-hours [operating license].”

Like its predecessors, the Paradox had no liquor license. “It was like a BYOB situation until they passed a law stating ‘no BYOB,'” Davis says. “But we never got in any trouble with the liquor board.”

Paradox’s legendary sound system was built up and refined over a few years. “At Paradox we started with getting cabinets from a place in Wheaton, Maryland, called Washington Pro Sound,” Davis says. “We started building a system, just kinda do-it-yourself with my knowledge of what equipment, what type of speakers, based on what I learned from the Richard Long sound system.” Long, who’d designed the Odell’s sound system, had died of AIDS in 1986.

“As a DJ myself, my pet peeve was sound [quality],” Davis says. “So that made me, when I was doing my club, try to make sure the sound [was right], and it was not so much for loudness but for clarity. So even though our system was able to be played extremely loud, most of the time I would try to forbid that, because it wasn’t necessary for it to be that loud to be enjoyable.”

The sound engineer Dave Soto, who’d done the sound system for Club Shelter in New York, eventually redid the Paradox system and helped it reach its full power. “They built the club around the kids as we danced week after week,” Ultra Nate told the Baltimore Sun in 2016.

“I’ve been to many clubs throughout the East Coast; it definitely has one of the best sound systems that I’ve ever played on, outside of maybe Japan,” DJ Oji told the Sun in the same article.

“The Paradox, it was a fuckin’ mecca to me. People talk about the Tunnel in New York, stuff like that, the Paradox was that to me,” says Tierre Brownlee. “If you ever experienced that sound system, you could be outside and feel the bass from outside, it was almost like the building was comin’ apart. The lights would be blinkin’ because the system was so pure.”

“[Today] you see people go out and buy thousand-dollar outfits to go party for two hours,” Brownlee continues. “We didn’t do that. We dressed to sweat. We’re not comin’ to take pictures, we didn’t worry about who the DJ was, we just worried about them playing that good music.”

Chicago’s second wave of house music, with its pumping beats and deadpan vocals, had a powerful effect on Baltimore dancefloors, particularly I-ROC-T’s 1989 hit “Work Your Body (Mike’s Houze Mixx)” and Cajmere’s 1992 classic “Percolator.” Those songs, perhaps more than any other songs made outside Baltimore, are honorary entries in the Baltimore club canon, staying in DJs’ sets for years and influencing the insistent, minimalist tracks local producers would make in the ’90s.

Baltimore producers were also innovating and creating sounds that would be sampled and imitated for years to come. DJ Technics created the hugely influential kick-drum pattern for the song “Dickontrol” – a simple variation on the classic “four-on-the-floor” pulse with triplet kicks at the end of the bar that would become the heartbeat of Baltimore club and several other styles of dance music.

DJ Rod Braxton, one of the most important DJs in ’90s Baltimore club who wasn’t also a producer, had a reel-to-reel tape deck in the booth to play unreleased music from local producers, sometimes months or years before it made it to vinyl. “The Paradox was bananas, college night was bananas, because Rod had the reel and he was getting’ that fresh Doo Dew Kidz music,” Tierre Brownlee remembers.

Braxton also had some signature blends that were never commercially released, like a “Ya Bad Sister” loop with the Barbara Tucker vocal from Hardrive’s New York house classic “Deep Inside.” “He merged ’em together for about five minutes, and that was a track, and it banged at the Paradox,” K.W. Griff remembers.

“I remember me and Technics and Rod Braxton and Big Red, we did Christmas night ’95 in the front room, and that shit was just off the hook,” DJ Kool Breez says, naming one of his favorite nights at the Paradox.

Paradox was perhaps the most important piece of an emerging club music ecosystem in the ’90s that included clubs like Louie Louie’s and Club Choices, which was the same building that had previously been the Carousel and Gatsby’s. Hammerjacks, a downtown brewery building converted into a venue on 1101 S. Howard Street, built a reputation as Baltimore’s most legendary rock club in the ’80s, booking hard rock bands like Guns N’ Roses and Ratt. In the ’90s, Hammerjacks also hosted dance nights and became one of the primary stomping grounds for Baltimore club. Hammerjacks closed in 1997, and reopened in 2000 on Guilford Avenue, where it remained a vital part of the club music scene. The Shake & Bake Family Fun Center on Pennsylvania Avenue, an all-ages space with a skating rink and a bowling alley, became part of the circuit for Baltimore club DJs.

According to Scottie B., there wasn’t a substantial difference in the crowds at these different venues in the ’90s, or in what club records they wanted to hear. “It was all the same at one point,” he says. “If you went to Shake & Bake or you went to Ozone or Hammerjacks, I mean they were all basically the same kind of people, same profile. They was in there to hear that stuff.”

Brownlee remembers some distinctions between different crowds, though. “I would leave from Ozone and go to the Paradox on Saturday. I would go from the knucklehead crowd, we used to call ’em that, and go down there to Saturdays at the Paradox with the melting pot,” Brownlee says. “Now don’t get me wrong, you could get your ass whooped at the Paradox on Friday night. Friday was college night, so it was more HBCUs [historically Black colleges and universities]. But it wasn’t that vibe on Saturday night.”

Paradox’s weekly schedule was a slight update of what Davis had done at Fantasy. “What dictates your crowd is the music. So each night, the music was totally different,” Davis says. “We went down to Paradox with the already established night of the Friday night being the college crowd, and then the Saturday night was our house music crowd; we only started out with those two nights.” Some Saturdays were also “industry nights” with featured performers, including Barbara Tucker herself.

“As people were exposed to the space, other promoters came. And that’s when we started doing the Fever party, which was, well, now it’s called EDM, but they were calling it a rave-type party or something like that, and that was every other Thursday,” Davis says. “And then eventually the gay crowd kinda mingled with the house music, mixed, diverse crowd. The Friday crowd was pretty much predominantly the Black Baltimore urban crowd. And then the rave crowd, y’know, was predominantly White.”

One straight male producer once told me that club music was sometimes described by people as “faggy music,” suggesting that despite the genre’s unusually diverse audience in Baltimore, there was still some lingering homophobic stigma to house music.

Baltimore club music was also starting to find a younger and younger audience that heard it on the radio and wanted to dance to it in clubs like the Paradox, and who would become a bigger and bigger segment of the genre’s audience over the next couple of decades. “Frank Ski brought in the teen crowd on Sunday afternoon, and it was all under-18 people,” Davis says. “He had started it over at Hammerjacks, and then when they were closed, he brought it over there to me.”

“Back then, the Black clubs that played club music were 16 and up. Hammerjacks, Godfrey’s, Ozone,” Scottie B. told True Laurels in 2014. “The music was fresh and people came out specifically for that music. That’s what sparked the clubs having nights for younger people. Older people would party with younger people because the scene was so vibrant. You had 23–25-year-olds partying with younger kids in spots without alcohol because it was that hot. It was about dancing all night.”

“Security on Friday nights, it got unruly. It got unruly down there,” Brownlee says, not referencing the label but simply using one of his favorite words. “Bodies was flying, oh my goodness, man. Them dudes would grab people and throw ’em down the steps. Them wooden steps on the side right there? It was beautiful, fuckin’ beautiful, I tell you. It was a work of art. You know what I mean? You ever seen somebody get fucked up and you be like, ‘Goddamn, that’s an art! This is a fuckin’ piece of work to see how he took this guy apart!’ It was amazing how they would grab three or four guys and just throw ’em down steps and police would be right outside waiting for ’em. I wanted to buy the steps on the side of the Paradox because of how many bodies flew down.”

It was a different story at some of the rougher clubs, where fights breaking out was accepted as an inevitability. “On the other hand, at Ozone, security would get out the way. One time the security did try to fight dudes, and dudes knocked the speakers down on ’em,” Brownlee says. “I don’t understand why you would have a pool table in a club for hoodlums. So you know what was goin’ on, then they was takin’ pool balls and puttin’ ’em in socks, swingin’ ’em at people!”

Around the holidays, even the seasonal decorations became props in the fights at Ozone. “They had a fuckin’ Christmas tree. They would throw people through the Christmas tree at one side, and dudes grab ’em on the other side and whoop they ass,” Brownlee says. “And Scottie would be up in the booth, ‘Security! Security! Turn the lights on!'”

Even as chaos might swirl around the DJ booth, however, the DJs themselves were afforded enough respect to remain untouched by violence in the clubs. “We was the DJs for the hood, and people took care of the DJs for the hood. We was, what you call it, made men,” Brownlee says. “The street dudes told us to stay out of the street, ‘Y’all keep on doin’ what y’all doin’, and playin’ y’all music and mindin’ y’all business, and we will do what we do on this side.'”

Tough Breaks is out 8/19 via Penguin Random House. Pre-order it here.