The name John Hillyard might be unfamiliar to many of our readers, even though you’ve likely seen him before. He is the man on the cover...

"When I first met Gab we went into a booth at KDVS and rapped first thing [...] we were just monks about freestyling..."

"85-86 that's when you start hearing samples in rap records so it went from DJs playing those records to people putting it in the sampler."

"Most of my early memories were from a town we lived in called Middletown, California..."

"I love the cat among the records! It's the notion that everything there has already gone through some kind of human cycle."

"I didn't have a computer so the first [Bomb Hip Hop Magazine] issue is actually done on my mum’s typewriter..."

"There was no Oakland rap in 1979 when Sugar Hill Gang came in, it did not exist. I thought it was so cool that people could do that..."

"I was a Street Music Director who was in charge of all the mixshows. We brought in a lot of DJs [...] and Josh was one of them..."

"I was one of a few DJs in the Sacramento Valley that actually had a mix show. Josh was at the Davis High School and he came down at KDVS."

"I worked at a record label called Poetic Groove [...] either ‘90 or ’91 and I was doing college promotions, sort of learning the industry."