H&F: What did you want to do on the prequels specifically?

S: I don’t know. It seemed obvious that somewhere in those movies they’d do a riff on the cantina from the original Star Wars, and I thought maybe I could be the musician in that. You know, what would a DJ look like in that world? Sure enough, if you watch the second prequel, Attack Of The Clones, they go into a bar that’s sorta like the original cantina, but there’s no music. None at all. Perfect opportunity and they blew it. That burned me up for so long. The idea that they’d do that, and also not being asked to work on anything for them after I’d done Star Wars Breakbeats. It just felt like I could have helped make those movies so much better.

H&F: I think a lot of people feel that way.

S: Yeah, everybody thinks the prequels are terrible. You know, The Phantom Menace completely destroyed my business [with Star Wars Breakbeats]. I put the cassette out in ’96, the CD in ’98…the whole time sales were going up and up. Then Phantom Menace came out in ’99 and there was a huge Star Wars backlash. Well, going into Phantom Menace sales were still good, but the movie was so bad it soured the world on Star Wars. Pretty soon after that I stopped making music, walked away from it to focus on my toys. I had been working on a follow-up album like Star Wars Breakbeats centered around Godzilla, but the business dropping off of the first album disheartened me.

H&F: Was the Godzilla album focused around one particular film in that series, or were there samples and audio pieces from various sequels?

S: It was pretty much just one era, like the ‘60s and ‘70s, when all the best Godzillas were made. Like Monster Zero, Destroy All Monsters!, Mothra… all the greats. I might still put it out one day just for kicks. You know, you can’t make money off of music anymore, so there’s no motivation in that respect. I also did a Lord Of The Rings album in 2001, one that I did actually put out, and it’s not good. It just doesn’t work. I did it with the Bakshi version, and the whole thing is too ponderous, too academic. I don’t like it at all.

H&F: Why do you think it came out like that? What didn’t make it work?

S: Well, when I did Star Wars Breakbeats I didn’t have Pro Tools. I did that whole thing on a tiny little Roland drum machine at my mom’s house. It only had 24 seconds of memory, so there was only so much I could do with each sample and drum beat, looping it around a bunch of times. But that limitation worked, because I was boxed in like that…the rhythms aren’t too complicated. It’s easy to get into. If you have the [2002] version of Star Wars Breakbeats with the prequel tracks I did later—I don’t like any of that stuff. I moved to Pro Tools and suddenly I had all this space where I could play around. Everything just got too busy, too complex. Like “Duel Of The Breaks,” I put in so many changes and so much more dialogue. Not good. But yeah, I feel like in the future I’d wanna put out everything I’ve done except The Lord Of The Rings album. Let that be lost to history. I don’t really care.