The year is 1994. I'm at home and I turn on the radio and there's this wicked song being played with Ice Cube on it. So I quickly pop a blank tape in my stereo and start recording. After the song is finished the radio announcer says "that was Snoop Doggy Dogg from Murder Was The Case". In those days Snoop Doggy Dogg was all the word and I was really trippin' off this song (the song was Natural Born Killahz from the Murder Was The Case Soundtrack - 1994) So that same night I decided I had to have this dope shit right away. So I went to a local mall to have a look around in the record stores. There was only one record store open; a small shop which had been around for a long time that also sold a lot of imported music and boxed CD's. I think local DJ's use to get their stuff from them sometimes back in the day. Strangely enough that record store was also shutting down and selling a lot of stuff on clearance the night I was there.
At the time I had no idea what CD the song was on only that it was Snoop Doggy Dogg and so I went flipping through tapes in the rap section and found the tab for Snoop Doggy Dogg. There was only one Snoop Dogg tape in stock called Over The Counter and for a second I thought this could be the one so I checked the back of the tape for the year and it said 1991. Now I already listened to a lot of Public Enemy, Ice Cube, Ice-T, Run DMC etc (did not know about NWA in 94') but that was back when I was shit broke. And so based on my knowledge I thought this 1991 tape couldn't possibly have that wicked-evil rap on it because it's old school. Based on the tracks on the back of the tape like 'County Blues' I was pretty sure this was going to be old school rap. But I wanted to hear Snoop Dogg so I bought it anyways and I think it was like 25$ for the tape (and that was their clearance price!). When I got home and played the tape I was disappointed over the production and beats, and, being the suburban kid that I was; I wanted to hear that hardcore gangster murder rap!. A week later I went to a different record store and bought Dr. Dre's Chronic tape, Snoop's Doggystyle, some MC Eight stuff and some South Central Cartel. None of those tapes had the Natural Born Killahz song and it wasn't until a week after that that I finally found the CD in the new releases section of another record store downtown.
For a long time the Over The Counter tape just sat, I didn't listen to it much but I remember playing County Blues a few times on my ghetto blaster at school and to the dismay of my teachers. The lyrics on the tape were considerably hardcore and explicit for 1991 and I thought it would be a cool collectors item someday. What sucked the most was when I had left the cassette in my parents car along with my Murder Was The Case CD, my Doggystyle tape and The Chronic and when they took the car to be cleaned at a carwash all our tapes and CD's got stolen by the cleaners. This happened in 1996 and we never got any of it back from the gas station. I began to learn more about Snoop Dogg since then (I even got Tha Doggfatha tape as a stocking stuffer) and, well, I just assumed that Over The Counter was Snoop's first album from back in the Deep Cover with Larry Fishburne days.
It wasn't until 2002 that I found out that this tape apparently never existed. I did an internet search on it and found absolutely no indications of it anywhere. That's when I decided to send an email to Death Row Records and ask them about it. Death Row (Suge) told me that he had no idea what I was talking about but that the tape would be worth a lot of money and that if I had any more information about it to send it to him. This I thought to be oddly mysterious so I went into the official Snoop Dogg forum to see if I could ask Snoop himself about it. Nobody frequenting the Snoop Dogg forums had any knowledge about the album and many of these peeps thought I was a liar. A few months passed and, by word, other peeps began talking about it in a few other forums. Those forums whent on for awhile and then interest died out. See not until recent years the public were led to believe that Death Row started in 1992 but my research on one of it's major sponsors (Harry O Harris) had confirmed that, from what Harris had told early interviewers, that it was actually founded in 1991. So the first thing that came to my mind was 'Cover-Up'. But then as soon as I started posting about conspiracies the forums began to get real heaty and for whatever reason they had to shut down the Snoop Dogg forum along with all the blog history. After that the case was closed for me and I just forgot about the whole thing for a very long time. It was just some mysterious thing I had encountered in the past and who the hell knows how it got there. All I have is the album cover and some theories. I blanked it out of my memory because apparently it never existed; de facto de facto.
1 comment:
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