It started with a sound.
A familiar bassline drifted from my son Mason’s room, low and looped, laid-back but haunting. I was across the hall in my bedroom, scrolling through Netflix, when it caught my ear and pulled me back three decades like a hook in a song.
I walked into his room and asked, “How do you know this track?”
He looked up, headphones still hanging around his neck. “Dad, it’s MF DOOM. He’s a legend.”
I blinked. “No… that’s Daniel. That was my old roommate.”
He tilted his head, waiting for a punchline. But I wasn’t joking.
Back in the spring of 1993, I was not yet eighteen and living in a tiny white house on Water Street in Quincy, Massachusetts with Jaime Wilson. Nothing glamorous, just a plain rental with creaky floors and a thin kitchen window that barely kept the cold out. But inside, it was alive with music, chess matches, and the static-crackled soundtrack of my youth. Our other roommate at the time was a soft-spoken, grieving, brilliant young man named Daniel Dumile.
The world would come to know him as MF DOOM. But when we met, he was still Zev Love X of KMD, a group whose songs I had practically memorized by heart.
We crossed paths during a party in Mike Brown’s basement on Gardner Street in Hingham. I was freestyling with a couple local kids, trying to find my voice in a world I hadn’t figured out yet, when Daniel stepped into the circle. He stood in the back, arms crossed, head nodding slowly. After a few verses, he smiled and said I reminded him of MC Serch from 3rd Bass.
I didn’t know who he was at first. Just that he was cool, different, quiet. Then Mike Brown whispered to me: “That’s Zev Love X. From KMD.”
I nearly dropped my beer.
I told him I wore out Mr. Hood and played “Who Me?” and “Peachfuzz” on loop so often the tape warped. He grinned. There was this energy between us, instant and magnetic. He had just lost his brother, DJ Subroc, who died in a tragic traffic accident crossing the freeway. Daniel needed to get away from New York, from the grief that hung heavy in every beat.
We had a lot in common. We liked cartoons, superheroes and villains, and monster movies, but mostly listening to old vinyl. When he asked if he could crash at my place for a while, I didn’t hesitate. What followed were some of the most intimate and creatively charged times of my life.
We shared that little house like it was a fortress of sound. Daniel had brought Subroc’s turntables, crates of vinyl, and a suitcase full of raw, half-formed ideas. We set everything up in the living room, records stacked on milk crates, wires coiled like snakes across the floor, and beat-up speakers that rattled the windows when we got carried away.
We’d spend hours just listening—really listening. Steely Dan’s Aja was one of our favorites. There’s a moment in “Black Cow,” right between the chorus and the verse, where a little riff pokes its head through the rhythm like a ghost. Daniel paused the record there and looked at me. “That’s it,” he said.
That moment sparked the backbone of what would later become “Gas Drawls.”
We weren’t just sampling sounds, we were sampling memories, textures, emotions. We’d flip through vinyl sleeves like they were sacred texts, pull out Japanese monster flicks on VHS, and let them play in the background while we worked. Godzilla movies became our shared mythology. The way the buildings crumbled, the low hum before a monster appeared, the warped, boomy audio. It all fed into our soundscape.
At night, when the music faded and the incense burned low, we’d play chess. He’d sit across from me in a hoodie, face half-shadowed by the light from the TV. Godzilla roared while we studied the board. Chess was how we communicated when there were no words for the grief in the room.
He moved a pawn forward and said, “Wu-Tang got the kung fu thing. What if we did monsters?”
That was the Monster Island idea being born, right there at our scratched-up kitchen table in Quincy. Each MC would take on a monster persona. Not to hide, but to become something bigger. To wield power in the face of loss.
“You could be Mothra,” he said once, laughing. “I’d be King Ghidorah. Three heads—triple threat.”
I didn’t know it at the time, but we were standing at the edge of something seismic.
Hearing Mason play “Gas Drawls” brought it all back, the cracked plastic on the turntables, the smell of coffee and chronic, the hiss of the radiator. I could still see Daniel leaning over the mixer, headphones half-on, his head bobbing while he chopped up a beat.
We talked music strategy over chess. We talked grief without ever using the word.
So I told Mason.
I told him about Daniel. About Subroc. About the turntables and the Godzilla tapes and the nights we sat in silence building something sacred out of sound. I told him about the idea for Monster Island, before the world ever heard it.
He stared at me like I had just told him I’d time-traveled. “Dad… you’re telling me MF DOOM slept on your couch?”
“Yeah,” I said. “And I had no idea he became MF DOOM. Not until now. I gave up rap music the day he left.”
Mason pulled up the album, rattled off facts I never knew. Tours, collaborations, critical acclaim. The mask. The mystery. The mythology.
I listened, stunned. Somewhere in that mix of awe and heartbreak, I realized something: the story I had buried in memory had grown into a legacy far bigger than either of us imagined.
There’s more to tell, of course.
About what happened next. About the day the turntables were stolen. About why Daniel left. About the guilt I carried. About how that loss pushed me to walk away from music altogether and join the military.
But that’s a story for another time.
For now, it’s enough to remember that once, in a little white house on Water Street in Quincy, two kids sat across a chessboard and dreamed of monsters. And one of them became a legend.