Handsome Dan, Automator Man

"And you know what, I can't blame him," he continues. "The truth of the matter is, I like to make records. I don't want to do shows as much as I want to make records. It wasn't like the end of the world for me. Instead of touring I got to go produce a bunch of records."

Thornton may not have appreciated his newfound alternative audience, but Nakamura was more than happy to take on a different style of music. His work with Dr. Octagon led to production gigs with Cornershop and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, among others. After years of working with hip-hop artists, Nakamura found that rock bands were more amenable to trying new things, working with new sounds. Hip-hop, for Nakamura, will always be his first love. But that doesn't mean he doesn't want to see other people.

"They're like, 'Let's see how far we can take it. Let's try this. Let's try that,'" Nakamura says, referring to his recent work with rock groups. "To me, that just makes it a lot more fun. The truth of the matter is, I love making hip-hop records. I would make them all the time. But there aren't a lot of bands willing to go that route, so I find myself making more alternative records. I'm doing an album now with Del tha Funkee Homosapien, and he's willing to go out there, and we're having fun. But, you know, at the same time, when I'm producing Jon Spencer or Cornershop or something, they'll let you go out there from the beginning."

Nakamura's willingness to "go out there," as well as his eclectic circle of friends, is obvious on So ... How's Your Girl?, a collaboration with another reformed DJ, Prince Paul, under the moniker Handsome Boy Modeling School. Featuring contributions by Mike D, Cibo Matto's Miho Hatori, Sean Lennon, Money Mark, DJ Shadow, Alec Empire, Spain's Josh Haden, and Father Guido Sarducci, the disc is a beautiful garbage heap of 40 years of music, piled high with everything from old-school hip-hop (the duo liberally samples from Paul's former band, Stetsasonic) and blaxploitation horns ("Holy Calamity [Bear Witness II]," easily the best of a good bunch) to gauzy trip-hop (the lush "The Truth") and prolonged bursts of static (Empire's unwelcome intrusion on "Megaton B-Boy 2000").

Like most of the projects Prince Paul and Nakamura have worked on, it's hard to take in all at once. Familiar samples are toppled by unrecognizable sounds, and it's all covered by more layers than old Bomb Squad productions, complete with wailing sirens and a Flavor Flav sample. More than anything else, it's a tribute to the early days of hip-hop, when there were no record deals, only mix tapes made by DJs. Nakamura cringes when he thinks of those early days, how something so revolutionary could sound so ordinary twenty years later. But he agrees that Prince Paul is the perfect person with whom to reinvent that time. After all, Paul was in one of the few early hip-hop groups Nakamura can still listen to and enjoy, without benefit of nostalgia.

"You listen to those records now, and you go, 'Whodini? You know what? They're not really that great,'" Nakamura says. "I don't mean to say that in a mean way. The reason I had such high reverence for them at the time was because they were one of three rap records out. On the other hand, I'll listen to an old Stet record -- like 'Sally' and some of that stuff -- and I'll be like, 'That's pretty darn good. It's not amazing, but it's pretty darn good.' They were kind of on to something."

It's hard to tell what Nakamura is on to, once you figure out the concept behind the Handsome Boy Modeling School project. And perhaps the most intriguing part of So ... How's Your Girl? is that the disc is more or less a tribute to the comedy of Chris Elliott. The pair borrowed their name from an episode of Elliott's late, great Fox-TV sitcom Get a Life, and that show, along with Elliott's underappreciated film Cabin Boy, appears in one form or another throughout. Nakamura even uses a Cabin Boy reference as the name of his publishing company, Sharkman Music.

"The third season [of Get a Life] didn't even run on the West Coast, and it was probably one of the best shows on television," Nakamura says, grousing about it almost a decade later. "Maybe he was too advanced for his time. Maybe it was never meant to be. It was just a little too much for people."