Long Red

The record

“Long Red” was written by Leslie West, Felix Pappalardi, John Ventura and Norman Landsberg and first appeared on Mountain, West's 1969 album on Windfall Records. The version hip hop producers use is the live one on Live: The Road Goes Ever On, released by Windfall on April 24, 1972, after the band had split. That performance was recorded on August 16, 1969, at the Woodstock festival in Bethel, New York. The album reached No. 63 on the Billboard 200 and No. 21 in the United Kingdom.

The break

The live “Long Red” opens with about 24 seconds of drums, played by N. D. Smart, who drummed with Mountain at Woodstock but is not credited on the album. Over the beat, West calls out to the crowd with “You out there?”, “Louder!” and “Yeah!” The drums give producers a clean, open rock break, and the shouts became a hook of their own. Smart's playing has been widely heard but little recognized. The track was later included in the Ultimate Breaks and Beats series, which put it in front of a generation of DJs and producers.

Into hip hop

The first credited use came in 1986 on Eric B. and Rakim's “Eric B. Is President,” and the break also appears on “My Melody” and on “Put Your Hands Together” from Paid in Full. Use grew quickly, from three records in 1986 to ten in 1987 and twenty in 1988, including Public Enemy's “Louder Than a Bomb.” In the 1990s it turned up on Nas's “It Ain't Hard to Tell” and the Artifacts' “The Ultimate.” Producers including Pete Rock, Rick Rubin and Kanye West have all drawn on it, and Jay-Z used it on “99 Problems.”

Legacy

“Long Red” has been sampled more than 700 times, making it one of the most used rock recordings in rap. Kanye West returned to it several times, on his own “The Glory” and Common's “The People” in 2007 and on Jay-Z and Kanye West's “N****s in Paris” in 2011. J Dilla built “Stepson of the Clapper” on his 2006 album Donuts entirely from the intro. The record shows how a few seconds of stage banter and drums, captured at a rock festival, became part of the basic vocabulary of hip hop production.