This was one of my most favorite projects to work on. WeedTRACKER Mix #1 is a reggae mix tape mixed by the bay areas legendary Jah Warrior Shelter Hi-Fi. Featuring 60+ banging ganja themed tracks this album is top notch. It’s got so many dubplates (a dubplate is a one-off record/track that’s not generally available as a release) and special guest it’s really one of a kind. My personal favorite is the “I got 5 on it” dubplate featuring Michael Marshall (of Luniz, it’s track #23) It doesn’t get much better than that.
Jah Warrior headlined several WeedTRACKER parties and they always killed it. They were the champion sound system crew for like the entire early 2000s and they never disappointed.
I spent several months contacting every record label and publisher of each artist on the album in an attempt to acquire the rights and licensing to release the album publicly (to sell on iTunes, etc.), but it ended up being prohibitively expensive due to the fact that artist like Snoop Dogg are used. At the time I just wasn’t sure that I would be able to recoup the investment it would take to get the rights vs. the potential sales of the album. Looking back on it now I probably should have just paid for the rights even though it was going to be in excess of $50k, I’m sure that after a decade I would have been able to make it back and then some. But who knows..
I wasn’t the lead designer (the lion, the Ganja Radar and the background are by Courtney Papke), I did the typography for the cover and the track listing and the back cover layout. It was quite difficult actually to get all the tracks into the track listing page because there were so many and to make the type big enough that you could still read it in the small space of a CD case (it’s a 4 panel Digipak).
