Carlo Sauce
Interview by Deyu Ntebya

How’s your new album “Gunsmoke & Mirrors” doing?

Great! Doing real good, and without any big labels behind it. It took a while to get out there. Now that people are getting it, it’s doing good. Now it’s really catching on, people are starting to hear it.

Is this your first album?

Yeah. My first solo one. I had a group with Teflon few years back. It was called The Affiliates. We put an album out in 2004. That was my first album, my entrance into the music. “Gunsmoke & Mirrors” is the first one I put out that’s just me.

You have a lot of features on your album like The Game, Mr. F.A.B., a lot of big West Coast rappers.

I did a lot of collaborations, pretty good ones. The Mistah F.A.B. and Turf Talk we did at Mendo Green Team’s Studio, put that one together, that was a good track.

You’re from Clear Lake. Is that near Ukiah?

Clear Lake’s between Ukiah and Santa Rosa I’m spread out all around here and northern 707, from Eureka down. We do a lot up in Eureka. We do the Northern California thing.

Is there a big music scene up in the Clear Lake area?

Yeah, it’s pretty good. Really it’s just starting. We have some artists starting up around here. Couple different cats getting it together. We all support each other and work together and the fans out here support us. That’s what it’s all about in the end. Without the fans we ain’t nothing.

Who would you name as some of the up coming artists in your area?

I’m working with Mendo Green Team, they’re out of Mendocino County. Teflon’s album is coming out real soon. And he got Tre on his album from out in Texas and he got Bizzy Bone on it. He did a track with San Quinn and Big Rich. That’s gonna be a real good album, got a nice sound to it.

How did you hook up with your label, Ante Up Records?

I’m the co-owner of Ante Up Records, I helped start it. Ever since then, it’s been non-stop grind. We started with nothing and been just going and going. We’ve just been making it happen. And really in the end it’s been for the love of the music. Take everything away and at the end of the day, you’ve still got you’re music. So I start off just doing for the love of the music, then I came to point where it was like why not press a CD? When we did, we got a pretty good response. We were just very underground and independent. Very local and we went far for being local. So we just took it another step farther and as time went on we started making connections and meeting people and just got a lot of love. You just gotta put out what you have on the table and hope that people would want to eat it up.

Who else is on the label?

We got a couple different people on the label. The thing is I’m filling so many shoes. A lot of people want to get put out but they don’t have the dedication, they don’t want to work on it or stick with it long enough. They just want to blow up real quick. But they want some else to do it for them. When that happens the people that really care about their music they’re the ones that shine bright. Cause the whole thing is, nobody’s going to do it for you. The artists we got on the label, we got Teflon, and we have Tylah Tossy. We have a few people.

It was a great way to get your music out, putting it out yourself. How did you decide to put out your own stuff? What made you start thinking that way?

I’ve always thought that you have to go and do it your self, you can’t just hope that somebody’s going to put it out for you. You got to hustle your stuff and make your money. Also the reason I start doing music in the first place was for myself, I just loved the music. I’m my own biggest fan.