Growing up in the rural South, Ray's living conditions and local entertainment options left much to be desired. After hearing a friend's copy of
Afrika Bambaataa & the
Soulsonic Force's "
Planet Rock", Ray purchased a pair of turntables. He and his friends began performing locally. At this time, their group did not have a name and people would simply refer to them as 'those white boys'.
Swatch Watch sponsored them, flying them to
Breckenridge, Colorado, for one of the first ever snowboarding events, where
Converse Sneakers reps provided additional sponsorship. Using his portion of the sponsorship money, T-Ray began building his record collection, which provided a solid foundation for his budding production skills. After mastering the concept of 'breaks', he quickly finished his group's first demo. A club in nearby
Charlotte, North Carolina, was having a talent contest which Todd won several weeks in a row, which qualified him for the finals. The final competition was judged by representatives from
Def Jam and
PolyGram. Although Todd did not win the final competition, a PolyGram representative approached Todd with the offer of a record contract in 1986. With no rural job opportunities, and his pre-med scholarship lost, Todd worked non-stop on music production. Unable to afford even the floppy disks to save the beats, he would just record them on cassette. Ray helped his family build furniture out of wood, which he dubbed 'folk art' furniture, with the tree bark still attached. People began paying handsomely for his chairs and he was able to save enough money to make the trip back to New York. Ray got a call back on his application as an intern at
Big Beat Records. Todd played a tape of his beats for
Craig Kallman and informed him "All I have is music". The morning after, Kallman called Todd (about
Kenny Dope's promo for Red Alert) and told him "if you know how to make this [recorded loop] into a record, you've got a job". T-Ray was the producer of Big Beat Records' first hip-hop 12-inch, 'Supa Cat' (1991- Todd is credited on the album as 'The Mad Racket'). 'Supa Cat' sold 70,000 copies and was the true beginning of T-Ray's career as a producer. He went on to produce an entire album for Double X, with 'Not Gonna Be Able To Do It" (1992) becoming his first video. T-Ray produced '
I Aint Goin' Out Like That' for
Cypress Hill's album
Black Sunday (1993) and was nominated for a Grammy for it (Best Rap single). Todd then became closely affiliated with the
DJ Muggs-led
Soul Assassins producing for Cypress Hill and
Funkdoobiest, among others. By 1996, Todd had begun to produce rock & roll. His 1993 remix of
House of Pain/
Helmet collaboration (
Judgement Night soundtrack) led to his producing of the entire Helmet album, which led to more rock gigs, including
311,
KoЯn,
Snot,
Hed PE, John Spencer Blues Explosion and
White Zombie. In 1999, T-Ray did production for
Santana (which led to a Grammy Award in 2000 for Album of the Year) and a Latin group named
Ozomatli who he won two other Grammys with, including a Latin Grammy- it was during this time that his life came full circle: "It was sort of like destiny in a way, for me to move from the woods to New York City," explains Todd Ray. "To get on as a producer, to go through turmoil, through hip-hop, and get to the point where I felt that people were doing hip-hop that I couldn't respect, so I moved to the West Coast to do rock & roll shit. I run into a group called Ozomatli who I wanted to do 'Incredible Bongo Beats' with. Their DJ just happened to be
Cut Chemist, who I knew nothing about. But, as we're finishing the record he tells me this fucking story of how he was inspired by this fucking tape that he got from down South, and that tape was my fucking tape. The same tape I made in that shack, the same tape that I played for Craig when I met him at Big Beat. The same tape that I had played for the trees in
Lancaster, South Carolina. I had made one copy for Eclipse (yes- that Eclipse), who originally lived in South Carolina too, who had sent it to an old friend in Rhode Island, who moved to L.A. and became one of the members of
Jurassic 5, whose DJ just happened to be
Cut Chemist. I felt like I had come 360 degrees!" [
Elemental Magazine, Issue #62] ==Venice Beach Freakshow==