In a recent interview with Lindsey Renee for the first episode of her show Behind The Patrol, Compton native and Death Row legend Dr Dre sat down to speak about his career, his legacy, and some of his biggest regrets.
Renee began by asking Dre (real name Andre Young) about what inspired him to enter music and asked him to recall some of his earliest musical memories. Taking himself back to his childhood, Young revealed, “My earliest memories of music started when I was really young when I was about four years old.”
He continued, “There’s actually a picture my mother showed me of me in a onesie reaching up to play records. This is before I could read, but I knew what the labels looked like, and I knew these songs were okay, [and] these were the songs people were going to gravitate towards. So there are pictures of me DJing at four years old at my mother’s parties.”Naming some artists, Young added, “I’m a fan of the sixties and seventies soul, James Brown, Curtis Mayfield, Barry White, Isaac Hayes. So that’s what I grew up on.
Speaking about how he finds samples and gets inspired, Dre detailed, “Fortunately for me, I grew up learning music. Reading the back of album covers, learning who played what on what. I was really interested in that and then I turned into a DJ. So my mental musical library got enhanced then!”
He added, “I started DJing when I was 14 years old, and that was a stepping stone for me becoming a producer, so I just have this massive amount of knowledge when it comes to old-school music.”
While in conversation, Renee presented him with the 12-inch Leon Haywood album Come And Get Yourself Some. However, when asked if he had a copy of the project which he had once sampled, he stated “I used to!”
Expanding, Dre unveiled, “I had a collection of records, I had over 80,000 albums that I stored in a warehouse, and at a certain point…I think it was in the early 2000s I sold all my wax, and I’m kicking my ass still about that. It was a warehouse. I had a turntable in there and a bar and everything, but it just turned into a bill because I was never going. It took me ten years to decide to sell.”
Dre admitted it was a big regret. You can watch the full interview in the video below.
