Knight on the Town

“Sir” Thomas Gray (I gave him the honorific some years ago—his name just sounded so proper and British) is more than merely one third of one of the 206’s highest-profile rap crews, Champagne Champagne, the group so nice they named it twice—he’s also one of the truest students of Seattle town business ever. Call the dude whatever you like (out of earshot), but don’t call him out about some real Seattle shit (or some one-on-one) unless you’re trying to get brown-bag schooled. The loquacious Mr. Gray shot the breeze with The Stranger about his pedigree, hiphop, and beyond while demo-ing drafts of the new Champagne Champagne album. Kick back and see if you learn something.

“In the beginning, I was like any kid getting it off Yo! MTV Raps,” he tells me. Soon enough, seeing figures like Tribal Productions’ DJ Topspin at St. Therese School in the late ’80s would make a big impression on the budding hiphop addict. “Top is from my hood. It was always about Tribal. Daryl Preston from Phat Mob came to St. Therese. I was seeing this cat, a year older than me, with Girbauds and Nikes and shit. I was like, ‘I have to have this life.'”

As a freshman at O’Dea High School in 1992, Gray met Delon Williams, who showed him his first up-close pair of turntables. “That was the first time that hiphop had ever really been that tangible to me,” recalls Gray. “Delon had lied about his age, and he was writing for [influential 1990s Seattle hiphop magazine] the Flavor while a freshman, back when they were being run out of the Tower Records on the Ave. I was getting exposed to that, getting to come to their offices and chill after school when I was 13 and 14, every day.”

Gray was hanging around in 1996 when Conception Records, a local hiphop label run by Mr. Supreme and Strath Shepard, and distributed by Sub Pop, became a reality. “Supreme, he was making beats, working with Jake One,” says Gray. “They had the office above Capitol Loans.” Williams, Gray, and their classmate Jeff Gillis got signed to Conception as the crew Fourfifths. “We signed that contract at Cafe Paradiso, got two g’s, and ran to the Bon—we thought we were fly,” Gray roars with laughter. Fourfifths put out a single 12-inch, whose A-side, “Earth, Wind & Fire,” appeared on Conception’s compilation Walkman Rotation, mixed by the Beat Junkies’ J-Rocc.

Gray left Seattle for Howard University in 1996 to pursue a degree in medicine. He dropped out and returned home during his sophomore year, although music was no longer where his head was at. “There was a long time I was just skating, bombing with the 3A clique, my BTM gang,” Gray says. “Skating down in Westlake Center. Living life, doing that every day. BTM and 3A, they brought me up in this downtown street shit, this side of the game. Downtown, drinking 40s, doing drugs, writing graffiti.”

“In 2004,” he says, “I went into a coma, woke up in the hospital, and was told I had a brain tumor. Went through five surgeries for fluid pressure in my skull, but right before the actual operation on the tumor, they told me it disappeared. After that, I decided I could never second-guess anything again. I’m just doing. I just now stopped celebrating that one!”

Not long after that, Gray was cutting heads at Sal’s Barbershop on Olive Way, with a noticeable zest for life. “That changed everything, that job got me back in the game; I was killing cats in there.” He brags, but he really was. Unfortunately, a soured romantic relationship (baldly addressed on one new Champagne song: “You’re a slut and my band rocks,” Gray spits as matter-of-factly as he’s talking to me) and the closing of Sal’s shop left Gray adrift again. “Then one day, Pearl (Nelson, of Champagne) came by the apartment and was like, ‘You wanna come on tour with me and Spankrock?’ And we packed my shit and we left. My life changes direction yet again. Later, Pearl got to work with Mark Gajadhar, who’s another amazing cat, and brought me in.”

Now, a spokesman for Champagne Champagne and a contemporary and friend of Seattle rock figures like, say, Spencer Moody, Gray feels that he “can’t come wack on any level.”

“The local Seattle stuff—from every subgenre of this underground shit here—has influenced me more than anything, straight-up.” Gray is 206 to the bone gristle, an appreciator of everything fresh in his backyard. “I’m not in some crew or scene thing where I can’t talk to this guy or that guy. Everyone out here is real special to me, because I seek game from them. And now I can go forth,” he grins maniacally, about to paraphrase an obscure Ghostface line like no big thing, “and bless these younger cats with jewels, and watch ’em slide away.”