Michael Viner died in August.

That might not be the kind of news that seems likely to jolt the hip hop world off its axis. After all, in most of the handful of obituaries published thus far, Viner is spoken of as a publisher of populist memoirs who also ran a successful audio-book company. But to any hip hop fan who checks sleeve credits and needs to know about songwriters, samples and source material, Michael Viner's name will mean something very different. And to those fans, news of his passing will mark the end of an era.

It was Viner who created and lent his name to The Incredible Bongo Band, a group of Los Angeles session musicians who made two albums in the early 1970s before disappearing back into the anonymous world of the Hollywood studio circuit. But it was their first record, and in particular the tracks Bongo Rock and Apache - a cover of an old tune made famous in the early '60s by Cliff Richard's one-time backing band, The Shadows - which earned them their pivotal place in hip hop history. It was those tracks which Kool Herc seized upon as the foundation of his new style of DJ-ing, which he put in to practice at the Hevalo club in the Bronx, where he took a second copy of the record and used that to repeat the percussion break, extending the section and sending dancers into raptures. OK, so maybe he'd have come up with the idea anyway, and used another record - but he didn't: so it's no lie to state that without the Incredible Bongo Band, and without Michael Viner, we may never have had breakbeats, hip hop, or any kind of loop-based, sample-driven music. So you'll forgive HIPHOP.COM if we pour out a little something in a salute to one of the architects of this art form - and dig out that copy of Apache and let the track Herc would later call "the B-Boy National Anthem" stand as four minutes' raucous tribute to one of hip hop's inadvertent founding fathers.

To commemorate his passing, we're publishing one of very few interviews Viner ever gave about the Incredible Bongo Band. In the autumn of 2000, HIPHOP.COM's Angus Batey and Paul Hampartsoumian met him in his suite at the Dorchester Hotel in London. This is the full transcript of that conversation, never previously published in full.

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[As the tape starts rolling, Viner is talking about his earliest involvement in music - at the New York folk clubs of the late 1960s.]

Viner: "When I was quite young I ran what were, at the time, folk clubs. Folk clubs then would include jazz and comedy, and at the time when I was growing up, the young people were Ramsey Lewis and Woody Allen, a whole bunch of very good people. And I got a job at 20th Century Fox after Robert Kennedy – I was an aide to Robert Kennedy – was killed..."

HIPHOP.COM: You were an aide to Robert Kennedy?!!? What, part of his political entourage?

MV: "No, I actually lived with him, and took care of the kids, and was just a junior aide. Rosie Grier and myself – an ex-football player, a large black gentleman. So that got me to LA, where he was killed, and then I got a job at Fox. And from Fox I went to MGM records, where the second album I produced was Candyman with Sammy Davis, Jr.. Mr Bojangles as well, had a lot of hits. And I signed the Osmonds…"

HH.C: Hold on a second... you go from being a live-in aide to a Kennedy to producing hits and signing the Osmonds...?!

MV: "It was from the background in the music industry and being friends with a lot of people. It was just lucky that the second person I signed at MGM and produced was Sammy Davis, and then the Osmonds. And then they gave me the presidency of different divisions of the company, including overseeing the soundtracks. And there was this little picture that we did called The Thing with Two Heads, starring Ray Milland and Rosie Grier. And at the end, after everybody thought the film was finished, they decided they needed a chase scene, which they did, but there was no music. So we came in and did it ourselves. And the song was Bongo Rock."

HH.C: This was you and Perry Botkin, Jr., who's credited on the albums?

MV: "And others. On the whole album there are... the best drummer was Jim Gordon. He's now in jail for the rest of his life because he heard voices and axe-murdered his mother. That's Jim. That was in the late '70s. He co-wrote [Eric Clapton's hit, released under the name Derek & the Dominoes] Layla and was in Traffic. We had wonderful drummers - seven of them. Hal Blaine, King Errisson, who's also there [points to the sleeve of the second album, The Return of the Incredible Bongo Band]. Perry was an Academy award-winning musician, and he also wrote Nadia's Theme, which was actually another piece of luck: he wrote the theme to The Young and the Restless, and just by luck, when Nadia Comaneci did her perfect 10 [in the Olypmic gymnastic competition in 1976], they were playing that theme. And it was replayed so much that it became Nadia's Theme, and a Number One record. He also wrote Bless the Beasts and the Children, which was an Academy award-winning song. And we also had people from Harry Nilsson to John Lennon and Ringo Starr – all sorts of people coming by and helping on a few tracks. John actually helped on the album, Ringo helped on percussion on one of the tracks. I can't even remember which one. John actually helped us with the mixing. When we were mixing he was there. And it was a wonderful time. Bongo Rock became an R&B hit, a Number One, and was doing well on the pop charts, but we made a pivotal mistake in putting out a colour sleeve showing mostly a bunch of white guys, and it stopped selling immediately! And we quickly took off the sleeve and went back to the plain one."

HH.C: So there's a Bongo Rock single knocking around with a Return of the Incredible Bongo Band sleeve?

MV: "A different sleeve, but from the same session. We went back to using the first cover, so you didn't know. There weren't many, and we destroyed them, and went back to not letting people know. And it's kept selling, somewhere throughout the world it seems. So anyway: we just did this as an add-on for a chase scene, but everybody liked it and it was a hit, so we did the album, and a second album. It kept going and MGM was sold to Polygram. I started my own company, I had people from the Sylvers... we had some different successes and then I started producing television movies and books on tape. My wife and I – my wife is an actress named Deborah Raffin – we've done more books on tape than anyone. We've done 1600. We've done 14 with Paul Schofield, and all of Dickens, all of Jack Higgins... Glenda Jackson has done quite a few for us, Alan Bates, Christopher Casanove has done quite a few... most of the Meryl Streeps, all of the Douglas Adams Hitch Hikers' Guides, The Bridges of Madison County. So we did those, which included some Grammy winners. We've had five Grammy nominations. Audrey Hepburn's Enchanted Tales won the Grammy a few years back [1993] as best Children's album; last year we won with Children's Shakespeare. They were all things that we did. It's not considered the music business to most people, but it is by me. It was called Dove, but New Millennium is the new company. We produced a film last year that had some popularity over here called Wilde, the life of Oscar Wilde, with Jude Law. And we've just been doing a lot of different things. My wife has a series in America, but she's done a good bit in England. She holds the record along with Jenny Agutter for working more times with Michael Winner than any living actress! Actually we lived here when she did Death Wish III with Charlie Bronson."

HH.C: You mean in London, rather than the Dorchester...

MV: "In the Dorchester. She did Lace, and Once Is Not Enough, and Night of the Dove. I produced some of them. A lot of what we're doing... we're doing 100 books on tape at the moment. But the Bongo Band keeps showing up. There was just a bidding war in the States for using Apache for a commercial, and Acura paid a mid-six figure amount to get the rights for a 30 second slot."

HH.C: And there'll always be a collectors' market.

MV: "I just saw a crooked copy that was so close to the original it was fairly frightening."

HH.C: Are you aware of the value of the original records?

MV: "No."

HH.C: You'll see Return... in shops over here for between £40 and £50, while Bongo Rock recently went for $90 on eBay.

MV: "Wow!"

HH.C: Anyway: can you tell us a bit about the recording sessions?

MV: "They were done a CanBase studios in Canada, and MGM studios in Los Angeles. There were a couple of other places but mainly those two. We held the record for some time, largely because I was such a poor musician, of over a thousand hours of recording time."

HH.C: What did you play?

MV: "Drums."

HH.C: Full kit or bongos?

MV: "A little of each. And I added a bass line here and there. It was done in layers and over about a two year period of time, for the two."

HH.C: You went and recorded a bunch of stuff and split it later into the two albums, then?

MV: "It got worse, actually. Whenever we were doing a session with someone else and we had time left over we'd do something, we'd try a new piece. I was interested in African music so we did a track called Kiburi, which might have been a new direction to go. We were toying with doing the William Tell Overture on bongos."

HH.C: There's a sleeve note that says something about the next record being done in London, with the London Symphony Orchestra...

MV: "That was going to be the William Tell Overture."

HH.C: What happened?

MV: "We just stopped. I had an illness for a while and then I went into the film business and had a few lucky breaks there. It's funny, we're always talking about it. They just asked us if we would come back here and do a reunion concert."

HH.C: Is there any chance?

MV: "A small chance. The problem for me is that Jim Gordon is... not available. I'll have to go and poll and see who else is around. Jim Gordon was the best drummer, and King Errisson, in terms of bongos, was the best player. A lady named Bobbi Hall was also brilliant. But on different cuts there was Hal Blaine, myself... and I think we had as many as seven percussionists. On the drum wars we would go sometimes to two hours and then cut it down to what you have there [on the records]."

HH.C: What about the guitars, bass and brass?

MV: "They were just very good studio people. Among the names from time to time was a man named Michael Omartian [who recorded another one of the original breakbeat classics, Rhythm Heritage's Theme from S.W.A.T., which gave LL Cool J the basis of his golden age classic I'm Bad - Breakbeat Trainspotter Ed]. Glen Campbell's somewhere in there. And there was also a guy who helped us called Don Coster, who was one of the really great arrangers of our time. It was really like an open house. I chose all of the material: it was just things that I liked. I had heard [Apache] for years. I guess... was it Jorgen Ingmann? Santo and Johnny? The Ventures? I had heard all of [those versions], there wasn't any one thing, I just liked it and felt that it could have been a little more rhythmatic than it was, and thought it could have used more percussion, and it worked."

HH.C: OK, so where did the musical vision come from: what made you want to go with the format of long percussion solos?

MV: "I just enjoyed it – no more than that. Perry Botkin Jr. did most of the arrangements, he's a wonderful arranger. And we'd bring in the musicians who would add things themselves. It was a friendly relationship where we'd experiment maybe for a couple of days on something. Oftentimes we threw it away, but we ended up with something we really liked. I was lucky I could use the studio any time it wasn't booked. They got to me after a thousand hours and said 'Enough!'. But we would try everything. Like with the song Bongolia - we were trying to do another song and we couldn't do it, so we ended up writing an original piece by accident. Somebody this morning asked me if there were a lot of out-takes, and there were, and thank God they've been destroyed! We tried a lot of things that were fun – I mean, I'd be curious to hear them, but I think we chose pretty much the best."

HH.C: And then in the Bronx, in the mid-'70s, Kool Herc buys two copies of Bongo Rock, invents breakbeats, and a new music emerges. When did you hear about it first?

MV: "I've been hearing about it and reading about it since, and not really focussing on it too much. Once in a while somebody would show up with a cheque! But we just... at the time it was developing and we were thrilled to be a part of it. It always surprised me, because all we were doing was something I liked, and there were no pretensions beyond that."

HH.C: The next thing was inevitably, as hip hop and breakbeats became a building block, your records got sampled. How do you feel about that?

MV: "There were times when that didn't bother me, and then times when sampling lasted 60 seconds or more, which I didn't think was right. So we're gonna try now to protect ourselves from that because so many people did it so extensively."

HH.C: Did you ever go to court?

MV: "No. But we have to now. [Unveils a bootleg copy of the Bongo Rock LP he's found, replicating the cover art as well as the music.] You can't not go to court over that."

HH.C: Do you see sampling as creative?

MV: "The problem is, it's a slippery slope. At first I didn't want to go after people who only used a few seconds, and then all of a sudden I'm told that if you don't, you have trouble going after the people who used 60 seconds, and that's almost your whole record. There's nobody who I wouldn't allow it, but not just to do it."

HH.C: People wouldn't have known how to contact you.

MV: "It's really not that hard. If you look on the web there's a frightening amount. I wish it wasn't so easy! I've headed a public company for 15 years and written seven books, so between publishing houses and record companies..."

HH.C: What books?

MV: "The first successful book released here was Final Exit for Cats – a suicide book for cats. There was a book called Final Exit which was a suicide book, and we felt it didn't go far enough, so I decided to do a suicide book for cats."

HH.C: What was your favourite feline suicide method?

MV: "I think there was... drawing a phone on their chest and dialling home with an icepick. All sorts of macabre things. My favourite was Final Exit for Barney, basically 101 ways to kill Barney. Somebody suggested that we do one specially at the time for Roland Rat. But then there was Tales from the Casting Couch, which was actually a pretty good book, 500 stories of actors about how they started out and their first auditions, their first jobs. Even Ronald Reagan talked about... it was a wonderful story he told, an incident that probably changed American history. He was a contract player and they asked him to do a little film, and he told them 'I'm through with doing crap'. And the film was Casablanca. Stories like that are really wonderful. There was another book I liked, Unfinished Lives, which took famous people like Marilyn Monroe, John Kennedy, James Dean – famous people, and did their biography as if they had lived. They're just developing it now as a television series. My next book is a book of Shakespearean insults, taking Shakespeare and instead of the usual curse words, showing what he meant. It's a way of teaching Shakespeare and educating that's fun at the same time. Roger Rhys did the foreword for us, and we've already done the audio. I've also written a lot of newspaper pieces and editorials. We did three miniseries in Yugoslavia, so I did a lot of pieces for Jack Anderson in up to about 1000 papers in the US. Actually I was the first person to report the phrase 'ethnic cleansing'. I was one of the first people to feel that the country was gonna break up and there was gonna be a war. You could tell even through the humour what was coming – they made jokes about the others like Polish jokes in America, but there was such hatred."

HH.C: We've brought along a few tracks that have sampled the Bongo Band. Would you like to hear a few?

MV: "Oh, wonderful!"

HH.C: First, Coldcut's Say Kids What Time Is It? [which sets the Disney King of the Swingers song to some Bongo Band bongos in the middle of a lengthy sample tapestry]

MV: "It's amazing! I don't know what more I can say to that. Amazing."

HH.C: You agree that there's artistry, craft, creativity there?

MV: "Absolutely, but I also heard a few of the other things he stole. Ennio Morricone. It's fun. I don't have a problem with what they're doing, but they should ask permission."

[We play him a few more.]

MV: "I'm speechless."

HH.C: Around 1989, everything changed. After a couple of court cases, everything was cleared, but before that people didn't really get forced to clear things. There was an element of unawareness. They see the turntable as an instrument and the record as the strings on a guitar.

MV: "Which is fine until people decide that their music is part of the turntable too. I've done some movies in the Philippines, and you go to a Philippine movie and there's a chase sequence, and all of a sudden they're cutting in people from Jackie Chan movies, or action sequences from other films! And they even had a film with some Star Wars stuff in it! I don't think it's really all that different. If you go to the movies and happen to see a bit of Julia Roberts doing a cameo, I don't think it's all that different. Then there's some things I would imagine... some X-rated rap I would really rather not be a part of. Police killing and that sort of thing."

HH.C: People have used Apache, often, not only because of the sound, but because they see that record as being central to hip hop.

MV: "That's so funny! That's hilarious."

HH.C: Can you understand its appeal? The way the rhythmic drive makes such perfect sense in these different contexts?

MV: "It's amazing. Actually, until you did this today I didn't realise the extent of it. But hearing it all together, I wish I could tell you that I envisioned any of it, but the answer is zero. We just did what we liked, which is the best thing that one can do anyway. It's funny, the idea of an artist and a producer being the same often works. There's an album by Jimmy Smith which I love, but he never liked it because it was too pop. To me it was the best thing that Jimmy Smith ever did. But that's the idea of whether or not you have your own vision. I really love it because it was the most disciplined album he ever did, which was why he hated it. It was funny, after we did Candyman with Sammy Davis, he walked out of the studio and said 'Never ask me another favour!' He hated it. But about three months after the record was out he sent me a Sony triple television for my office. Very funny. You just never know. But anyway, hearing it put together in one time in one place really makes you think."

HH.C: How do you feel? Flattered? Angry? Aggrieved?

MV: "Oh, all of the above! [Laughing] All of the above. It's always nice to be paid for what you do, but luckily I made a living, I didn't go round cutting off my ear or committing suicide or anything serious. So I am flattered in a way, but in another way we've always fought to respect other people's rights, because there's so many of them that don't. Early on I did something that I sort of regretted at MGM. Frank Zappa had left them with about eight hours of music that they wanted to make an album from, and I worked diligently for a month to cut it down and put out what I thought was a really good album. I put it all together and sent it to Mr Zappa for his approval. And he was in a big fight with MGM, and it was evident he wasn't going to approve anything, but I'd worked hard on it. He had his secretary call back to say, 'Mr Zappa doesn't want to talk about it, he thinks it's the worst'. So we put out an album called The Worst of Frank Zappa, so I felt I was at least true to the way he saw it! We actually laughed about it years later, but I was always concerned with artists' rights. At MGM there were artists who would do anything to break their contract. Eric Burdon used to picket the company! Stand outside. But he was offered a huge contract somewhere else and he didn't have a good contract with us. He wasn't my artist, he was actually my friend, but to have to go to work and see him and War picketing the company... War signed somewhere else even though the album was Eric Burdon Declares War. I think he was a great artist who never really got his due. There was too many fights. My favourite was Richie Havens – Here Comes the Sun. I did mostly R&B with Jerry Butler and Infinity. I did a lot of things with Solomon Burke, who I just loved. He went to MGM after Atlantic. He and Freda Payne just did a childrens' album for us. She's a good friend of mine. Actually, before I got married, I used to date Freda for a couple of years, and we stayed friends."