How “Who Let The Dogs Out?” Conquered The World

Join host Steve Greenberg for a deep dive into the remarkable story behind the unexpected smash hit “Who Let The Dogs Out?” by The Baha Men, a song celebrating its 20th anniversary. It's a tale involving crate-digging in Trinidadian record stores, Alex Rodriguez, Rugrats, and more. (You’ll also find out who’s really barking those “woofs” of the song’s hook and how that hook traces back years before the song was even recorded.)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Speed of Sound is a production of I Heart Radio. Hi,
and welcome to the very first episode of Speed of Sound.
We'll get to the bottom of how artists, songs, and
even whole genres of music went from complete obscurity to
exploding as pop phenomena. I'm Steve Greenberg, a Grammy Award

(00:26):
winning record producer, veteran label executive, and all around music obsessive,
and in our debut episode, I'll be taking you on
a journey to explore a pop phenomenon for which I
had a front row seat because I'm also the guy
who twenty years ago this summer unleashed the record who
Let the Dogs Out on the world, Who Let the Dogs,

(00:47):
the Dons Out, the dows Out. It doesn't really matter
what I want to be remembered for. The thing I
know that I will be remembered for most no matter

(01:09):
what else I do for the entirety of my career,
is I produced and put out the song Who Let
the Dogs Out by the Bahaman. How did a random
Trinidaddian carnival song recorded by an obscure Bahamian band become
one of the most well known tracks in modern pop
music history. You're about to find out people either love

(01:32):
or hate that song, but there's no denying it became
a musical sensation. I've always been really fascinated with the
idea of pop music phenomena and how does something go
from nothing to being ubiquitous worldwide, like almost overnight, Like
how does that happen? In the early nineties, I met

(01:54):
this guy named Jean Karacos. He was this very unusual
French guy who had master minded the whole phenomenon that
was Lambada. Now, for people who don't know what lambado was,
Lambado was this Brazilian dance that for a minute in
the late eighties, took over the global culture. There were
movies about Lombada, a teacher, his student and the dance

(02:17):
that changed their lives and Tora school apart. There were
lots and lots of records that ripped off the lambada
beat and tried to capitalize on it. But at the
heart of it, there was this one record called Lambada
by a group called Kaoma, who were a French group
that were put together by Jean Caraco's and he had
an entire step by step plan of how he would

(02:39):
take this record in this group and bring them to
the center of world culture, and he actually accomplished it.
Gai Fishooda, for instance, he struck a deal with one
of the biggest French TV networks too have Lombada be

(03:01):
featured in all their programming. And he did a deal
with a citrus drink company where he had Lombada be
the soundtrack to a big citrus drink commercial that ran
in the summer of nine in France. After meeting Jean
Karacos and hearing his story, I thought to myself, Hey,
I'd like to mastermind a pop phenomenon to someday that
would be really fun. Now, pop phenomena don't just happen

(03:24):
by themselves. There's usually somebody somewhere masterminding the whole thing
to try to get maximum exposure and to get everything
to go right. With who let the Dogs Out? A
lot of things went right, and they went right at
the right time, but none of it was actually that easy.

(03:45):
Was the head of A and R at Mercury Records.
And R stands for Artists and repertoire. A and R
people are the people at a record company who sign
artists and help artists make records. One day, a man
named Jonathan King came to my office. Jonathan King was
this British guy. He was a very well known character
in the music business at that time. He had a

(04:06):
weekly newsletter called the tip Sheet, and in the tip
Sheet he rated new records and he tried to turn
the music industry onto records that he thought should be hits.
He had a really really good year Jonathan King. He
brought to the surface big hits like Chumbawamba's tub Thumbing,
for instance. So Jonathan King walks into my office and

(04:28):
he says, I've got this great record by a new
group called Fat Jack and his Pack of Pets, and
you've got to hear it. It's gonna be a smash.
And he puts this record on and I hear the
record and it's just this horrible record, Like it's a
really putrid record. It's being some by this guy who's
obviously using a fake Caribbean accent, and it's his really
really really fast, frantic record, and it's annoying in every

(04:51):
single way. And I immediately realized that the person who's
singing the record is Jonathan King himself. And I say
to Jonathan, oh, come on, Jonathan, this is not some
new act named Fat Jack and his Pack of Hats.
This is you. And Jonathan admits that it's him, and

(05:11):
he says, but what do you think of it? And
I say, well, the truth is that the hook of
this song is really good, but everything else about the
song is horrible. I said, you know who wrote this song?
Like maybe we can get them to rewrite it, or
we can, like, you know, figure out another way to
do it. And he said, I really don't know who

(05:32):
wrote it. It was written by somebody in the Caribbean.
I'm not really sure who. I kind of felt like
he was holding out on me and didn't want me
to know who wrote the song, so I didn't press
the issue. I just love that hook. It was one
of those hooks that you couldn't get out of your head.
And in fact, I took the c D of Fat
Jack and his Pack of Pets and I put it
up on the shelf with the other CDs in my office,

(05:53):
and every once in a while I pulled that CD
down from the shelf and I'd give a listen to
that song, and the hook always held up as a
great hook. The song basically is a bunch of women
at a party making fun of the guys who come
into the party, and it's the women really who were

(06:13):
yelling Who Let the Dogs Out. Early on, there were
some people who were concerned that the song was actually
being misogynists and somehow that the dogs in question were
the women at the party. But it's very clear if
you listen to the song that it's in fact the
women making fun of the men. So about a year
later I left Mercury Records. UM, the company that owned
Mercury PolyGram, had been taken over by Universal and they

(06:35):
actually closed the Mercury label. My wife had just had
our first baby, and it was great to be able
to spend time at home with my wife and my
new baby and just take a year off, and that's
what I did. But that whole time during that year
that I took off, I still kept thinking, one of
these days, I'm going to figure out how to do
that who Let the Dogs Out song the right way,
and I'm going to have the biggest hit in the world.

(06:57):
And then finally it hit me. I thought to myself,
if we could do that song who Let the Dogs
Out kind of in the style of what there it is,
it could really really work a party over there that way,
he handsaid yes today, Yeah, these three words mean you
didn't this a bolt is me? Now? Of course what

(07:18):
there it is is way slower than that Jonathan King
record that I had heard, and I thought that if
we slowed it down and gave it a little bit
of a hip hop vibe, it actually could be appealing. Now.
The first thing I needed to do if I was
going to record the song was I needed to figure
out who actually owned the rights to the song. I
had no idea who wrote the song. And back then,
this was before Google, it was before it was so

(07:40):
easy to get so much information on the Internet. And
I kept looking everywhere and asking everybody if anybody knew
about this song and who wrote it, and I really
couldn't find anything. And finally I got desperate and I
went to this old search engine site that used to
exist that was called asked Jeeves and Asked Jeeves the
way you search for something is you literally would just
ask a question in question for him and it would

(08:02):
come back with answers. So I typed into ask Jeeves,
who let the dogs out question Mark and Asked Jeeves
took me to this message board of people reminiscing about
their Caribbean vacations, and in the message board there was
this thread about the song who Let the Dogs Out,
and literally there were posts where people would say, I

(08:25):
just came back from Barbados and I heard this amazing
song called who Let the Dogs Out? Does anybody know
who does it? And then the next person would say,
I have no idea who does it, but I just
came back from a cruise in the Caribbean and I
heard it too, It's so great. And then the next
person would say, I was just in Bermuda and I
heard the song too, and I wish I could find it,
And it just kept going. There were all these people

(08:46):
who had fallen in love with the song when they
were on vacation in the Caribbean, and they had no
idea who did it or how to find the record. Finally,
somebody came on the message board and said, the song
is called Doggie and it's by Anthlem Douglas and it
could be found on a record called Trinidad Carnival Hits.

(09:08):
Now this was really exciting because I finally knew how
to find the song. So I went down to Tower Records,
which was one of the really really big record stores
in New York at the time, and I found the
Trinidad sub section in the World Music section, and I
actually found the Trinidad Carnival Hits series. I went through it.
They had Trinidad Carnival Hits ninety six, ninety seven, ninety nine. Oh,

(09:28):
where's ninety eight? Right? So I was kind of thwarted.
So I went up the block to the Virgin Megastore,
which was another massive record store. You know, back then
there were all these really gigantic record stores in New
York that had everything basically, And once again I went
to the World Music section, looked for the Trinidad section,
and I found the Trinidad Carnival Hit series and once
again ninety nine. Dang. So I went to the buyer

(09:53):
in the World Music section at the Virgin Megastore and
I said to him, you have this series Trinidad Carnival Hits,
and you have nine, but I'm looking for do you
guys have that? And he said no, it's really really funny.
I can never keep that one in stock. Bingo. The
light bulb went off over my head and I knew

(10:14):
even more than ever that if I could find this
song and put out a proper version of it, I
could have the biggest hit in the world at the time.
Our daughter, who was two years old, had a babysitter
who was from Trinidad, as it happened, and she lived
in the Trinidaddian neighborhood in Brooklyn, and I asked her,
are there any Trinidaddian record stores that are near you,

(10:34):
or maybe you could go in and see if you
could find this record Doggie by Anselom Douglas, And so
she did. She actually went into her local Trinidaddian record
store in Brooklyn and they had the cassette of Ansom
Douglas performing Doggie, and she brought it back for me.
And now I knew who wrote the song, and I
knew how to find him, and I also knew the
original version of the song, which was much much better

(10:55):
than the Fat Jack and his Pack of Pet's version.
But once again, even the original version was a very
very fast, frantic Trinidad carnival version of the song. I
knew that for American audiences we'd need to slow the
song down and give it a little bit more of

(11:16):
a contemporary beat. I was resolved to make this the
biggest hit in the world, and I knew that in
order for it to work, it really had to be
recorded by an authentic Caribbean artist and not some American
or British person pretending to be Caribbean obviously, and that's
when I decided that I wanted the song to be
performed by the Bahaman. I had known the Bahaman for
a long time. I actually had worked with them both

(11:38):
at Atlantic and A Mercury. The way I originally met
the Bahaman is actually kind of an interesting story. I
was the head of A and R in the early
nineties at a label called Big Beat Records, which was
owned by Atlantic Records and Big Beat Records a few
months earlier had had a big, big hit with a
group called Joe Manda and a song called Make My
Body Rock. As the head of A R the label,

(12:10):
it was my job to try to find a follow
up song to put out after Make My Body Rock.
And I put the word out to all the usual
suspects out there, all the attorneys and managers and producers
and songwriters, to see if we could find a song
for Joe Amanda to sing. This One attorney told me
he knew a songwriter, producer, who lived in New Jersey,
a b Hamian guy who used to work with Cool

(12:30):
in the Gang, and he might have the song I
was looking for for Joe Amanda. So I took a
meeting with this guy named Kendall Stubbs. The meeting was
in August and it was really a hot day. I
remember when we had the meeting, and Kendall Stubbs arrived
for the meeting about an hour late, and he was
covered in sweat, and he told this awful tale of
woe about how he had driven in from New Jersey

(12:51):
and there was horrible, horrible traffic, and he spent a
half hour stuck in the Holland Tunnel in this horrible heat.
And then after he got out of the tunnel, he
circled around the block where my office was for another
fifteen minutes trying to find a place to park, and
he couldn't find any parking, so he ended up parking
in a parking lot and he had to pay thirty

(13:11):
five dollars to park, and he was obviously quite frazzled.
But I tried to calm him down and I said,
we'll just play me what you have. Let's let's hear
the songs you have for Jamanda. So he played me
this one song for Jamanda and it wasn't what I
was looking for. He played me another song for Jamanda,
and that also wasn't what I was looking for. I said, okay,
play me another one. He said, no, that's all I've
got now. He had been in my office at this

(13:33):
point for a grand total of about six minutes, and
I said, well, don't you have anything else you could
play me. I kind of felt bad for him because
he had had this horrible time getting to my office.
He had spent all this money and all this time
to sit down and have a meeting with me, and
he had been in my office for just a few minutes.
And I didn't want the meeting to end because I
didn't want him to feel like he had wasted his time.

(13:54):
So I said, don't you have anything else you could
play me? He said, all I have is this local
Bahamian thing that I've been working on, but it's not
anything you'd be interested in. It's just a thing for
the local Bahamian market. I said, just play it for
me anyway. And I was just thinking, like I just
want to extend this meeting by a few more minutes
so he doesn't feel like he's been cheated. So he
put on this record called Back to the Islands Call Kiss.

(14:25):
I heard the song and I said, that's actually great.
I love this and he was shocked. He thought I
was kidding him. He thought I was pulling his leg.
I said, no, no, I really like this. I really
want to put this record out. It's so good. I
think this record could be a hit. What's the name
of the group. He said. The name of the group
is High Voltage, which I thought was a horrible name

(14:46):
for a group, but then he said, actually, we're looking
for another name for the group. So of course before
you put out a record by a group, you kind
of want to meet the group. So I went down
to the Bahamas with Kendall Stubbs and I met them,
and uh, they really taught me a lot about Bahamian
music on that trip and why it's distinct from other

(15:07):
forms of Caribbean music. The guys who were in High
Voltage were some of the most respected practitioners of a
musical form called junk Anu, which was indigenous to the Bahamas.
I'd known a little bit about junkano because I knew
that there were a couple of groups in the early
seventies who had records that incorporated the Junkano beat, but
I didn't really know the story of Junkano. Junka Who

(15:30):
is this Caribbean music that's based around rhythms played by
goat skin drums and cow bells. And the major showcase
for junk a New Music is the annual junk a
U Parade that takes place in Nassau in the Bahamas
every year on Boxing Day at three o'clock in the morning.
Boxing Day, for those who don't know, is the day
after Christmas. Junkan who takes place on Boxing Day at

(15:51):
three o'clock in the morning because back in the days
of slavery in the Bahamas, Boxing Day was the only
day that the slave owners allowed the slaves to come
out and play their music in public on their traditional
African instruments. So in honor of that, the Bahamas has
continue to have a tradition of having a junk A

(16:13):
New Music parade every year on Boxing Day at three
o'clock in the morning. There's a local legend in the
Bahamas that one year on Boxing Day, a slave by
the name of John Canoe led a slave revolt, and
that he used the music of the goat skin drums
and the cow bells as a clarion call to call
out to all the other slaves on various plantations and

(16:34):
organize everybody in a slave revolt. It's unclear whether this
story is apocryphal or not, but it is a story
that's gone down as part of the legend of junk
a New music Now. Junk a New music made its
first foray into the international music world back in ninevy
one when a local Bahamian group called The Beginning of
the End put out a record called Funky Nasa that

(16:55):
actually went on to become a massive worldwide hits We've
kinda tug We're gonna call. One of the members of
the group, a man named Tyrone Fitzgerald, set off on

(17:16):
his own solo career under the name Doctor Off and
dr Off's mission was to try to take hardcore junk
ano rhythms and mail them with pop melodies and have
hit songs. He actually was very, very successful in the Bahamas,
although his music never made it out of there, and

(17:38):
when he was putting together his band to play this music,
he turned to this young bass player named Isaiah Taylor,
who was a massive junk anew aficionado. He rushed to
Junkano every year in one of the top junkano groups
called the Saxons, and he loved junk anoo, but he
also loved funky bass playing. So Isaiah Taylor became the
bass player in dr Offs band and they had a

(18:00):
number of really really fantastic records that combined junkanoo and
pop sensibilities. And then eventually Isaiah Taylor broke off from
dr Off and formed his own group called High Voltage.
This was back in the early eighties. Eventually he added
other musicians to the group, including a young drummer named
Moe Grant who actually had put out a record on
Mercury Records in the mid seventies called Funk Machine when

(18:22):
he was a member of a group called Gary Davis
and the Vendors. He also added to the group two
members who had also been in the group T Connection.
Now T Connection actually had had a really really big

(18:42):
hit back in seven called do what You Want to
Do that actually spent seven weeks at number one on
the U S Disco chart. So he had some of
the very very best players in the Bahamas in this

(19:04):
group High Voltage, and they became one of the biggest
bands in the Bahamas during the nineteen eighties. I immediately
loved these guys, and they told me that they had
decided on a new name for the group. It was
going to be the Bahaman. Now it's funny because we
always call the group the Bahaman. I think pretty universally
that's how they're known. But actually when the group named

(19:24):
themselves that, they thought that the pronunciation would be Bahaman,
like Bahamas. They never thought that people would be calling
them the Baha Men. But of course people will do
what they will do. So they recorded a proper version
of Back to the Island and we put it out
on Big Beat, and the song actually came incredibly close
to being a very very big hit. It went to

(19:47):
number one and a bunch of small markets, but Atlantic
never really gave it the bandwidth to push it nationally.
But because the record had almost become a hit, that
gave me license to go and do another Bahaman album,
because people out like this was a group that had
some potential. While we were doing the second album, a
very strange thing happened. The Baja Men were asked to

(20:08):
play themselves in a movie. The movie was called My
Father the Hero and it starred Gerard deparddu and also
featured a very young Katherine Hagel in her film debut.
It was a story about a father and his daughter
who went down to the Bahamas on vacation, and it
was a love story about the daughters first romance, many

(20:28):
nights sitting with memories, but he's not coming come on.
Basically your typical family movie. It was made by the
Walt Disney Company, so the Bahaman play themselves in the movie.
One of them actually has a speaking role, and they
sing several of the songs from their first album in

(20:49):
the movie. They even got to record an original song,
Oh Father as the movies end credits theme, and we
put that song out as a single. But oh Father
actually didn't turn out to be the most significant song
on the Bahaman second album. The most significant song was
a song called Sunny Day that was written and produced

(21:11):
by Lenny Kravitz. Now, Lenny Kravitz is one quarter Bahamian.
His mom, Roxy Roker, the famous TV actress who was
in the TV series The Jeffersons. Her father was Bahamian,
and so Lenny Kravitz spent a lot of time down
in the Bahamas, visiting family and friends and just hanging out.
Because of this, Lenny Kravitz knew The Bahaman and they

(21:33):
were able to ask him if he would do a
song with them for their next album, and he did.
He wrote a song called sunny Day and he produced
it and it was on the album. It was never
a single in America, but it was one of the
better things on the album. Now, at that time, in

(21:57):
the early nineties, Lenny Kravitz was a very very man
of star and he was especially big in Japan. And
because Lenny Kravitz had written and produced Sunny Day by
the Bahaman, the Japanese affiliate of Atlantic put the album
out in Japan and heavily promoted the song well. The
album went platinum in Japan pretty soon thereafter. I left

(22:18):
Atlantic Records and took a new job as head of
A and R of Mercury Records, and one of the
first acts I signed was The Bahaman. I knew that
they had a lot of potential, and because they sold
records in Japan, I was able to justify signing them
because I knew that we could get our money back
just from selling records. In Japan. So we put out
two more Bahaman albums on Mercury, and while they didn't

(22:40):
sell anything in the US, both of them once again
went platinum in Japan. Even though Lenny Kravitz had nothing
to do with either of those albums, the Baja Man
had actually managed to establish a real career for themselves
in Japan, and the money we can make selling records
in Japan on the Bahaman was enough to justify continuing
to make records with them now. One of the other

(23:01):
acts I signed at Mercury was a group called Hanson.
The Bahaman sort of tangentially play a role in the
Hanson story as well. I first went to see Hanson
at a county fair in Kansas in the spring of
and incredibly, part of their set included a performance of

(23:24):
the song Back to the Island by the Baha Men. Now,
to be honest, I kind of thought that they were
pulling my leg, that they knew I was coming to
the show and they learned the Bahaman song kind of
to butter me up. But it turned out when I
met them that they said, no, we actually loved that song.
They had heard it on the radio and Tulsa, where
they lived, and I guess it had gotten some small
amount of radio play there, and they fell in love

(23:45):
with the song, and they actually had recorded it on
an early self released album that they'd made a couple
of years before they ever even recorded m Bob the
Hands and Guys proved to be such big Bahaman fans actually,
that they invited the Bahaman to be the opening act
for them when they played the Hollywood Bowl at the
very height of their fame in the late nineteen nineties,

(24:06):
and they still occasionally played back to the island live
to this day. Probably the Hollywood Bowl gig was the
peak of the Bahaman's US career up to that point,
but bigger things were on the way next up on
Speed of Sound. Why the Bahaman didn't want to record

(24:29):
Who Let the Dogs Out? And why their lead singer
walked out in the fall of I decided that it
was time to end my sabbatical from the music business
and come back by recording who Let the Dogs Out
with the Bahaman. I was so sure that the song

(24:51):
would be a hit that I wrote in my diary
in December, I'm going to record that song who Let
the Dogs Out with the Bahaman and have a big
hit everywhere in the world. I am sure of it.
There was only one problem. The Baha men were unaware
that I wanted them to record the song. So I
called up Isaiah Taylor down in Nassa and I said, Isaiah,

(25:12):
I have the greatest idea of a song that you
guys can do and have a really, really big hit.
And he said, well, what's that? And I said, well,
do you know the song who Let the Dogs Out?
And he started laughing. You know, excuse me for laughing. Boy.
We were actually rehearsing at my house that day. Random

(25:35):
phone rhyme, I pick it up. Steve was on the
other end and he said, he have this song, great idea.
He would like for us to do the song. So
I said, okay, Steve, what's your name of the song?
He said, Who Had the Dogs Out? And I just said,
point blank, man, are you crazy? He said, yeah, of
course everybody knows that song. It's massive. I said, no,

(25:58):
it's only been massive in the Caribbean. In Isaiah, outside
of the Caribbean, nobody knows that song. And he put
his foot down and said, I Am not going to
have the Bahaman do that song because that song has
already been a hit and the Bahaman are not a
cover band, so I really had to work on Isaiah,
and I had to convince him that I really had
a plan of how to take that song and make
it into the biggest hit in the world, a new

(26:20):
serious and he said, Sila, I just want you to
do this one song. That's how much he believed in
the song. So we're going back with forward backward, forward
back and I said, okay, Steve, conversation is over. Eventually,
Isaiah relented and he agreed that we could record the

(26:40):
song with the Bahaman. We will do the song. There
was only one problem. The lead singer of the Bahaman,
Niamiyah hild had just quit in order to become a
backup singer on Lenny Kravitz's upcoming world tour. Now, obviously,
there was no way to record the song with the
Bahaman if they didn't have a lead singer. So I
niha Maiah and asked him to stick around in the

(27:02):
Bahaman for one last song before he left. Nie A.
Maiah didn't want to do it. He was really tired
of the lack of success in the America's for the
band and the lack of making a lot of money,
and he just really wanted to go out on tour
with Lenny Kravitz and get a paycheck. I literally resorted
to saying to him, Nie a Maiah, I'm begging you,

(27:22):
please stay with the band for one more song and
then you can go do whatever you want. I'm sure
this is going to be a hit. But Niemiah refused.
He said I'm out of here. So I got on
the phone with Isaiah and I said, we really need
to find a new lead singer to do this song.
It would really be great if the new lead singer
was young, because the Bahaman at this point, we're all
in their forties. Isaiah said to me, I've got just

(27:44):
the right guy. He's actually Sydney Potier's nephew. They call
me Mr TIBs now Sidney Potier, the famous actor, is
actually the most well known person ever to come from
the Bahamas. I said, is he young? And I say said, oh, yeah,
he's a young guy. Don't worry about it. So now
we were finally ready to record this song, and I
called my friend Michael Mangini, who was a very well

(28:06):
known producer and I'd worked with him on a few
records and just thought he was an incredibly talented guy.
He'd want a Grammy a few years earlier as a
producer of one of the big hits by Diggible Planets
like that, I'm cool like that. I'm cool like that.
I'm cool like that. I'm cool like that. So he
was very well versed in hip hop. And I called
Mike and I said, I want you to do that song.
And Mike also was kind of skeptical about getting involved

(28:29):
in the project. He came to my apartment and he
had had a VCR tape and he was like, hey,
can I put this in and play you something? And
I was like sure, And so he plays me this
song with like a middle aged man in this video
running around in a dog costume to a track that

(28:53):
sounded like a Cassio keyboard was just playing like some
random track out of the keyboard, and it was a
guy barking and singing about dogs. And I thought this,
he's this has got to be a joke. It can't
be serious about this song. My first reaction was a

(29:15):
you're kidding. Then he it was He was like no,
I'm completely serious, and I was like, I'm don't get it,
Like why I don't. He was like, I think it's
a hit song if it's done correctly, and I was
like really, and he's like, yeah, just imagine, like if
it was a really cool group. I was like, well,
what would the track be like? And he's like, well,

(29:35):
why don't you make the track like in a whoop there?
It is so one of those Miami bass records. And
then I was like, okay, that it's interesting, Like I
can at least started to see the idea that there
might be a vision behind the madness of let's do
this song with this guy in a dog suit. I
managed to convince him, so we went down to Miami

(29:57):
to record the song with the group, and as it
turned out, Sidney Poortier's nephew just really wasn't cutting it
as a lead vocalist for this song. And on top
of it, he was in his forties. I guess for Isaiah,
who at that point was in his fifties, Sidney Portier's nephew,
who was at his forties, seemed like a young guy.
So I said to Isaiah, we really need a great
lead singer and somebody who's young to really give this

(30:19):
song the appeal that it's going to need to have
in order to be a hit. I asked Isaiah if
he knew anybody else. He said, no, I don't really
know anybody off the top of my head, But why
don't we just hold auditions and find a new lead singer.
And then Steve got this amazing idea that I should
go to the Bahamas and the band would get The
people of the Bahama is very excited about this, and

(30:42):
a bunch of people would come in audition to be
in the Bahaman and I could audition them. So Mike
Mangini flew down to the Bahamas to audition new lead
singers for the Bahaman. Of course, now we've all seen
like American Idol a million times, but at the time
this was like some cutting edge thought. So I go

(31:03):
to the Bahamas. I sit in some you know, ballroom somewhere,
and people in like their chef hats and they're poker
black jack outfits and would come in and basically pick
some song and sing acapella for me. So Mike called
me and said, I think I have a new lead singer.
The only problem is it's actually three lead singers. So

(31:25):
we wound up getting three new lead singers for the Bahaman,
and they were all around twenty years old, and they
were all really charismatic and great dancers, great singers, really
great stage presence, and great voices. So Mike went back
down to Miami to record with the new lead singers,
and one of the lead singers, Rick Carey, sang the verses,
and another new member, Marvin Prosper, sang the chorus who

(31:48):
let the dogs out the Dog and also added this
incredible rap that was never in any of the previous
versions of the song about so talked in a gay
kind of Now, Marvin was one of these completely undisciplined
wild geniuses who said these incredible things in his rap lines,

(32:10):
but none of it really made sense. So I sat
down with him while he was writing the rap and
edited everything and kind of just tried to make it
make a little bit of sense. At least. Marvin couldn't
really figure out how to end the rap. But I
had recently heard a reggae record called Living an Easy
by Richie Spice featuring a Jamaican rapper named Snatch Your Dog,
and at the end of Snatch Your Dog's rap, he

(32:31):
kind of went into this howl, And so I said
to Marvin at the end of the rap just howl
like a dog and the lamb. After working with Marvin

(32:52):
on the rap, I went back to New York, leaving
Mike in Miami to finish recording all the vocals in
the song, and he came back with a finished vocal
and I heard it and I was dejected. My heart sank.
I said, oh no, this is all wrong. And I
was like, what do you mean it's all wrong. I
follow the melodies, follow the words. I followed everything, and
he's like, you have them saying who who who? And

(33:16):
they should be barking. It has to be barking. It's
not who ng, it's barking. And Steve was very obsessed
with that I had gotten this part wrong. So we
booked travel and back down to Miami we went. Now,
as it turns out, the Baha men, while they were

(33:36):
great musicians and fabulous singers, were not very good barkers,
and they just couldn't really get the bark that I
wanted them to get. And I finally said to them, guys,
I need you to do it like this, and they
heard me do it and they said, okay, Mr smart Alec,
if you think you're such a great barker, why don't
you just do it? And so I did. And so
when you hear the record, who let the Dogs Out,

(33:57):
that's me barking. We were finally happy with the recording
and we went down to one of the top mixers
in the music business to get him to mix the record,
but we really didn't like the mix he did, so
in the end, Mike Mangini actually mixed the record in
his apartment. The last step in making a record is
mastering the record, which is kind of controlling all the

(34:19):
compression in the volume so that it sounds good, especially
on the radio. We went down to a mastering studio
with one of the top mastering engineers in the business,
and Mike brought the music from his studio. We get there,
I pull out the main real, you know, the official
version of the mix, and Steve listens and says, that's

(34:41):
not it, that's not right. There's something wrong with this.
It didn't sound right to me. There was something that
was off. I just kept saying, the magic isn't there.
There used to be magic in this record, and the
magic is gone. So we go back and forth and
we listened. Mike thought I was crazy because he said
to me that what I have here is exactly the
same as the CD that I gave you when you

(35:01):
left the studio. It's a digital copy. There can't be
anything different about it. But luckily I actually had the
CD that Mike had given me when I left the
studio when we mixed the record, and then he pulls
out of his bag the scratched up c D ref
that I gave him. It didn't even have a case.
It was just a loose c D bouncing around in
my briefcase. And I pulled it out and I said, no,

(35:22):
I'm telling you, the magic is on this disc. And
he's like, let's listen to this. We listened to it,
and when we played it, indeed, there was something different
about it. It had the magic. I kind of think
that the magic that I was referring to was a
particularly harsh way that the snare hit on the verses,
and for some reason, for me and actually for everybody

(35:43):
else who was listening in the mastering studio that day,
having that harshness made the record sound magical, and not
having it made it not sound magical. That's the one
that's the magic. That's when we got to use that's
when we mastered, and the record is now mastered. Now
we needed a able to release the record. As it happened,

(36:03):
I had been offered a label deal by London Records,
which was one of the labels owned by the Warner
Music Group. Because I had had that big hit with
hands in a couple of years before, they thought it
was worth taking a bet on me and giving me
my own imprint at London Records. Well, I was on
the verge of signing the contract with London Records when
I walked into their offices and played them what I
intended to be the first release on my new imprint.

(36:25):
It was Who Left the Dogs Out? Of course, I
played the record for the general manager of the label,
who absolutely hated it. She didn't just hate it, she
made fun of it. She said it was the stupidest
record she'd ever heard. She went so far as to
turn on her radio in the office and put on
the radio station Z one hundred, the big top forty

(36:46):
station in New York, Best Progress, and she said, listen
to this. This is Z one hundred. This is what
Z one hundred sounds like. Is your records sound like
it belongs on Z one? I think not. Well, I
was at a crossroads. I could either sign the contract

(37:09):
with London Records and forget about Who Let the Dogs Out,
or forget about London Records and figure out some other
way to put out Who Let the Dogs Out. Well,
I've gone so far with this record at this point,
there was no way I was going to just put
it away in order to sign this label deal. Now
you have to understand that I was really really close
to signing the contract. In fact, I even had an
office at London Records. I had already started to come

(37:32):
in and work on projects. So for me to walk
out over Who Let the Dogs Out was actually a
pretty big deal. It had never in my life occurred
to me to start my own record company, but I
decided I was going to start my own record company
for the sole purpose of putting out Who Let the

(37:52):
Dogs Out and showing London Records that they were crazy
not wanting to put it out. I decided to call
the label s curve after the as shaped cumulative adoption
curve that's central to the diffusion of innovations paradigm, which
is something I'd studied about in graduate school. The diffusion
of innovations paradigm describes the path that any new idea
or product takes as it moves through society on its

(38:14):
way to becoming successful or on its way to flopping.
And when I got into the record business, I always
looked at it as a kind of roadmap for how
to have a hit. My advisor in grad school Everett Rodgers,
the guy who actually invented the diffusion of innovations paradigm.
He created all those terms like early adopters and early
majority and laggard and all those things. He was really

(38:34):
proud of the fact that I called the label es curve,
especially after the song went on to become such a very,
very big worldwide hit. We opened the label in May
of the year two thousand. It was just me and
my friend Steve Yagoel, who had worked with previously at Atlantic,
where his biggest claim to fame was actually signing the
group Fountains of Wayne. It was just the two of

(39:06):
us with our cell phones, not even an office. When
we were getting ready to put the record out. We
didn't even have a logo for the label, and I
had no idea really how to get a logo at
short notice. My wife knew a woman who was in
her new mom's group who was apparently a graphic artist,
so we asked her if she can make a logo.
She made a logo in an afternoon and sent it
over to us. We slapped it on the record and

(39:27):
incredibly we've been using that logo for twenty years. It
was probably the best one dollars we ever spent coming
up on Speed of Sound. Two kids movies battle over
Who Gets to Let the Dogs Out and helped to
make the song a massive hit. We're able to finance

(39:57):
putting out the record by licensing Who the Dogs Out
to an independent label in Japan called Toy Factory. Remember,
the Bahaman's previous four albums had all been certified platinum
in Japan, so they were a valuable commodity over there.
The label in Japan gave us two and fifty thousand
dollars as a license fee for the record. It was
all the money we would ever need to turn the

(40:18):
record into a hit. We eventually managed to find Anselm Douglas,
the man who wrote the song Who Let the Dogs Out,
and we introduced him to some friends of mine, David
Simone and Winston Simone, who had just started their own
publishing company. They did a publishing deal with Anselm, and
they proved to be very, very important allies in our
effort to turn the song into a hit. Winston and

(40:39):
David pitched the song both to Nickelodeon Nick Nick Nick
Nick Nick Nicknick and Disney to use the song in
various movies, and as it happened, both Nickelodeon and Disney
were really anxious to use the song. Disney wanted to
use the song in their live act in movie One

(41:01):
and one Dalmatians. Not surprisingly, Nickelodeon wanted to use it
in their upcoming animated feature rug Rats in Paris. Both
Disney and Nickelodeon offered us amazing packages of goodies if
we let them use the song in their movie, including
live concert specials by the Baja Man on both the
Disney Channel and on the Nickelodeon channel, Radio, Disney support,

(41:23):
support to help fund the music video, all kinds of things.
In the end, we decided to go with Nickelodeon because
their movie Rugrats in Paris wasn't coming out until November,
and they promised to support the song on their channel
for the next six months until their movie came out.
That seemed like too good of an offer to turn down. Now,
we needed to get the song on the radio. Back then,

(41:44):
songs got released to the radio stations before they were
ever available commercially. I called my friend Danny Goldberg, who
had been my boss both at Atlantic Records and Mercury Records,
and who had recently opened his own label called Artemus Records.
I told him, I've got a song that I think
is going to be a smash and I would love
it if you guys would help me get it on
the radio. When I told him the song was by

(42:05):
the Baha Men, he was like, oh, no, not them.
It had almost become a joke in the music business
that every time I got a new job at a
new label, the first thing I would do is signed
the Baha Men. He said, I don't really think those
guys could have a hit, they're so old. So I
explained to him that we had just brought on three
new lead singers who were young and cool looking, and
when he saw a picture of them, he said, Okay,

(42:25):
I get it, and this song is really great. And
we cut a deal with him where we would use
his record company's radio promotion and marketing services in exchange
for paying his label one dollar proceed he's sold. It
turned out to be an amazing deal for both sides.
Around this time, I had lunch with my friend Rob Stevenson,
who I had hired as an A and R guy

(42:45):
and Mercury Records, and who was still at that label. Now.
Rob has both great instincts and great musical taste. He's
the guy who signed Fallout Boy and The Killers. We
hadn't seen each other in a bit, so we were
getting back together just to catch up and talk about
records and what people were doing, and he was starting
his new company and all of these things. And he

(43:06):
had this huge smile on his face. I told Rob,
you're not going to believe this, but I promise you
that within the next few weeks, I am going to
have the biggest record in the country. I said, it's
this song by the Bahamn. Rob rolled his eyes. I
don't know what I was expecting, but I don't know
that was it. And I was like, mm hmm, okay,
and he said, and remember that song that I've been

(43:28):
chasing down for years when we were at Mercury called
who Let the Dogs Out? That's it. I found it
and they recorded it and it's going to be massive,
and I just sat there trying to sort of hide
my look of shock. I really thought he had lost it.

(43:51):
And I remember walking back from the restaurant to the
office and all I could think was how sorry I
felt for my old boss and mentor, because maybe he
had lost his touch, Maybe he had gone so far
down the rabbit hole of his own um taste that

(44:12):
he really had lost it. Remember, it had become a
little bit of a standing joke in the music business
that wherever I went, I signed the Bahaman. And of course,
up until this time the Bahaman hadn't had any success
at all in the United States. Well, that was about
to change, and really quickly. There was one final piece
of the puzzle that we needed to put together, and

(44:34):
that was sports. In my original vision for how this
song could become a worldwide phenomenon, I always knew that
it had to become a really, really big sports anthem.
So I called Fred Troub. Fred Troub, at the time,
was an out of work radio promotion guy. He had
worked for some big labels, but at that moment he
was between jobs. More importantly, Fred Traub was a certain

(44:56):
type of guy. He was that guy who knows a guy,
you know what I mean. He seemed to have great
connections with sports teams, like he would get your tickets
to the Yankee game and he would say, when you
go in the stadium, I want you to knock on
the door of this particular suite in the press level
and a guy is going to open the door, and
he's the guy who plays the organ at the stadium,

(45:16):
and I want you to meet him. He just was
the guy who knows a guy. I called Fred Trout
and I said, I want you to figure out who
picks the records in every baseball stadium in the country,
and I want you to find that guy and work
that guy like he's the program director of a radio
station and you're trying to get your record added to
the radio station. Fred took me up on the challenge.

(45:38):
I'm like, I don't know. I guess I could put
together a list and find out who all the content
manages at all these states. Maybe they'll care, maybe they won't,
but it's worth a chance. So he said, go ahead,
go do what do you charge me, man? I'm like,
I don't know, I'll figure something out. This is now
I want to say end of May beginning of June
in two thousand, the first team he got to play
the record was the Yankees, my favorite baseball team. It

(46:00):
was amazing hearing the song in Yankee Stadium for the
first time. Pretty soon though, the Mets started playing the
song too, and in fact, the Mets played the song
so much it started to become identified with the Mets,
and the Yankees decided they would never play the song again.
Very quickly, lots of other baseball teams started to play
the song, and for a lot of them, it really
became the team's fight song. Meanwhile, the Artemis promotion team

(46:22):
set to work to get the song played on the radio.
I remember Memorial Day weekend two thousand. I was at
my house and Steve Yagool was there along with Mike Mangini,
and we got a phone call from Daniel Glass of
Artemis Records to tell us that the song had been
played on a radio station in Nashville, Tennessee, and that
the telephones had gone crazy. People were calling the station

(46:43):
endlessly asking them to play that song again. From that
point on, we really had no doubt that this song
was going to be a sensation and A couple of
weeks later, it started to get played in New York
City on Z one, eventually becoming the number one most
requested song on the station. You can imagine that that

(47:03):
was a very very sweet feeling. While it was really
exciting to hear who Let the Dogs Out on the radio,
the truth is it wasn't the radio that really propelled
the song to success. Radio definitely provided an initial, crucial
spark that got people to hear it the first time,
which was great, But the song was too polarizing to
be a very very big hit on the radio. For

(47:24):
everybody who loved it, there was another person who couldn't
stand it, and so in the end, it didn't even
get that high on the radio charts. The song peaked
at number twenty on the Airplay chart, and on the
Billboard Hot one hundred, it only got up to number forty.
The record became massive because of two things, kids and sports.

(47:46):
The deal we had struck with Nickelodeon to place the
song in reg Rats in Paris proved to be really
crucial because Nickelodeon had this thing that they did on
the air every afternoon called the Nick Video Picks. What
they would do is They would play about fifteen deconds
of three different videos every day, and then the kids
would vote online for which one they wanted to hear
in its entirety at eight o'clock that night on Nickelodeon.

(48:09):
Now this was a really big deal because Nickelodeon had
a really massive audience. Every time Who Let the Dogs
Out made it into the three songs that they previewed
in the afternoon, we sprung into action. We galvanized the
troops and got everybody we knew in the world to
vote as often as possible. It was our mission in life.
Our efforts paid off. Throughout the summer of two thousand.

(48:32):
You could see Who Let the Dogs Out at eight
o'clock at night on Nickelodeon just about every night. Meanwhile,
Fred Trap's efforts at the baseball stadiums were really paying off.
As the season wore on, more and more teams were
using the song, most notably the Seattle Mariners, for whom
the song became the theme song that season for Alex Rodriguez,
who was having one of his best seasons. You have

(48:54):
Alex Rodriguez that every time he steps up to the plate,
he's a threat to hit a home run. So when
he was walking up to the out of the batter's
box carrying his bat, literally all action at Safeco Field
would stop, you know, people would be focused on Alex
Rodriguez and the piece of who Let the Dogs Out
is now being played for a minute and a half
two minutes while he's walking up to his batting position.

(49:16):
So for us, that was a really a key music
moment for us to be part of. By the time
the baseball playoffs rolled around in October, no less than
five of the eight teams in the playoffs had who
Let the Dogs Out as their fight song. The Cardinals,
the Giants, the Mariners, the Mets, and the White Sox.
You literally had teams playing each other in the playoffs

(49:38):
where each team had the same song as their fight song,
who Let the Dogs Out. So by this point the
song was really beginning to become a phenomenon. Most songs
peak on the charts when they get their maximum airplay.
Who Let the Dogs Out peaked on the chart when
national interest in baseball reached its highest the World Series.
By the time the World Series started, the album was

(49:59):
in the top five nationally. Now two thousand was an
incredible baseball season. If you were a New York baseball fan,
because that was the only year there's ever been a
Subway series between the Yankees and the Mets, and the
Mets decided to ask the Bahaman to perform the song
on the field right before the start of Game four
the series at Chase Stadium. Now, because the World Series

(50:20):
was being held in New York, we got offers from
Good Morning America, The Today Show, and CBS This Morning,
all who wanted the Bahaman to come onto their show
and perform who Let the Dogs Out during the week
of the World Series. That's the kind of thing that
only happens in your fantasy life. We had to pick
between the three shows. We decided to go with Good
Morning America because they offered us a performance two days

(50:43):
in a row on the show. This came as a
shock to The Today Show, who would assume, for some
reason that the Bahaman would of course say yes to
their invitation to perform, And in fact, on the Friday
before the start of the World Series, the entire Today
Show crew announced that the Bahaman would be on the
show next week, and every Boddy, al Roker, Matt Lower,
everybody else saying who Let the Dogs Out? In unison

(51:05):
as the show ended. Oops. Having the Baja Men perform
at the World Series turned out to be an incredibly
exciting adventure for me and everybody else involved in the
record for starters, Major League Baseball wanted all kinds of
things out of the band. They wanted the band to
perform at a party before Game four, They wanted to
use the phrase who Let the Dogs Out on souvenir

(51:25):
T shirts, all kinds of things. And every time we
made a deal with Major League Baseball to give them
more rights, we made sure to ask for more and
more tickets to World Series games. As part of the price.
We also wound up with a pair of all access
passes to the World Series, and these were literally all access.
It was really exciting. Now. I am a very, very

(51:45):
big baseball fan, especially a Yankee fan, and when USA
Today around a big article about the phenomenon of who
Let the Dogs Out at the World Series, they asked
me if I was rooting for the Mets because they
were the team that was using the song, and I
defiantly said, no, no, no, I'm rooting for the Yankees.
The song is great, but in the end, you've got
to stay loyal to your team. And by the way,

(52:07):
the Yankees won the World Series, but not before the
very exciting moment in Game four when who Let the
Dogs Out was performed by the Bahaman on the field
right before the game. And when I say right before
the game, I really mean right before the game. Cheryl
Crowe sang the national anthem that night, and after she
finished singing, the Baha Men came out on the field

(52:28):
and sang the song right before the first pitch was thrown.
I got to stand out there by home plate while
they were performing, and I understood that this was an
incredibly special moment, a moment that I almost certainly would
never experience again. There I was standing at home plate
right before the start of a Subway series game between
the Yankees and the Mets, and the Baha Men were

(52:50):
on the field performing a record that I brought into being.
This was an era before camera phones existed. People didn't
all walk around with a camera in their pocket. But
standing there at home plate and knowing that this would
probably never happen again, I wanted to record the moment
in my mind forever, and so I slowly turned my
head looking across the entirety of the crowd in the

(53:14):
stadium taking it all in, making a mental video in
my mind of the moment, and that video still remains
in my mind even after the World Series ended. The
song didn't let up. In fact, it was performed at
the Super Bowl too, because it was the fight song
of the Baltimore Ravens, who won the Super Bowl that year,

(53:35):
as well as the personal theme song of their star player,
Ray Lewis. That fall, we had a platinum record party
in New York to celebrate the album's success. By the
time Christmas rolled around, the album was triple platinum, and
that's triple platinum album sales. The weekend before the two
thousand election, Al Gore's campaign asked the Baha Men to

(53:56):
come out to Michigan to perform at a rally that
Gore was speaking at. They went out there, and I
remember there was a promise that if al Gore won
the election, the Baha Men would get to play at
one of the inaugural events. Now that never happened, and
it's probably the one thing that failed to happen in
the entire Who Let the Dogs Out campaign. Years later,
Who Let the Dogs Out intersected with the world of politics.

(54:17):
One more time when Mitt Romney very awkwardly started singing
the song in an attempt to relate to a group
of African American kids while on the campaign trail out.
As the year came to an end, the record and
the band and the label won all kinds of awards

(54:38):
from Billboard in their year end issue. On top of that,
the record on the back of the incredible success of
Rugrats in Paris, the movie won the Nickelodeon Kids Choice
Award for Favorite Song, and it also won the Radio
Disney Award for Best Song to Annoy Your Parents With.
And then we got nominated for a grand We all

(55:03):
flew out to l A for the Grammy Awards. Who
Let the Dogs Out was nominated in the Best Dance
Recording category. We were sitting in the Staples Center for
hours as dozens and dozens of Grammys were given out
in all sorts of categories, and at one point two
members of the Baha Men, including Marvin Prosper, the person
who actually sang the line who Left the Dogs Out,

(55:25):
decided that they were kind of hungry and they left
the arena for a few minutes to head out to
the lobby to get a slice of pizza. As it
happened while they were out getting pizza, our category was
called and we won. We were jumping up in the
air and hugging each other, and we all ran onto
the stage and Isaiah Taylor, speaking on behalf of everyone,

(55:46):
gave a beautiful and humble speech, and then they whisked
us backstage, where you go from press outlet to press
outlet and give interviews. We were gone for about an
hour backstage. When we came back to our seats, there
was Marvin and the the member of the Bahaman who
had missed getting the Grammy. They were sitting there kind
of dejected. I felt really bad for them. Winning a

(56:07):
Grammy is an incredibly special moment and they really should
have been up there on stage to get that Grammy.
As the evening drew to an end, Marvin Prosper turned
him and he said, I'll tell you one thing. The
next time we get nominated for a Grammy, I'm gonna
wait in my seat until our category is called. Unfortunately
for Marvin and the rest of the Bahaman, lightning didn't

(56:27):
strike twice. Now it turns out that the baham and
we're the only Bahamians ever to win a Grammy, and
they still aren't to this day. This was caused for
celebration down on the Bahamas, and the Government of the
Bahamas decided to hold a big parade for the Bahaman,
where we'd all be driven in convertibles down Bay Street,
the main drag of Nassau, holding our Grammys high in

(56:49):
the air. It was an incredible moment. The streets were
lined with cheering people. The high point for me came
at the end of the parade route when Hubert Ingram,
the Prime Minister of the Bahamas, gave me the key
to the city of the Bahamas. I was in shock
to receive such an honor, even though when I thought
about it later on, I realized the Bahamas is in
the city, it's a country, But still I cherished that

(57:12):
plaque and I still have it on the wall in
my office to this day. Over the next couple of years,
the Bahaman became the go to band for just about
every family oriented film. They did theme songs for the
Wild Thornberries movie, Crocodile Hunter, Scooby Doo, Miss Congeniality, rat Rates,
and they even recorded the end credits theme for the

(57:32):
movie's Shrek and so many more In fact, they did
so many movie theme songs that eventually we put out
an album called The Baha Men's Greatest Movie Hits. And
while many people look at the Baja Man as one hit, wonders,
that's not exactly true. They had a second hit, a
pretty big one too, called move It Like This. Movel

(58:03):
Like This wasn't as big as Who Let the Dogs Out?
What Is? But it was big enough to earn the
band a Nickelodeon Kids Choice Award his Favorite band that
next year. Now there's an old saying in the music
business that goes where there's a hit, there's a writ
And eventually a lawsuit did find its way to Anselom
Douglas when someone else claimed authorship of that famous hook

(58:26):
to Who Let the Dogs Out. The lawsuit was eventually settled,
and now Anselom Douglas only shares part of the writing
credit for the song. But the stunner for me was
years later when I received a phone call from a
man named Ben Sisto who claimed he was the greatest
expert in the world on Who Let the Dogs Out?
And he had new information about the real origin to

(58:47):
the song's hook. His story tracing the origins of that
hook back many decades became the basis of a great
documentary movie called Who Let the Dogs Out. It's definitely
worth checking out. It turns out that while Ansom Douglas
didn't come up with the hook to who Let the
Dogs Out needed it, the guys who sued Anslom Douglas.
The song had such a contentious litigation history. It's not

(59:11):
just like one party student another party. There's claims and
counterclaims and sort of time traveling legal maneuvering, and uh,
it's so convoluted that even the presiding judges, you know,
are kind of like joking or like making comments about it.
And yeah, it was just fascinating, um, how complicated it was.

(59:32):
It turns out the songs hook goes way back in
his movie Sister Traces the first recorded version back to
the early nineteen nineties and two teenagers in Florida, Brett
Hammock and Joe Gonzalez from Jacksonville, Florida. They were basically
like cool teenagers who met in the late eighties early nineties,
and they loved Miami based music and Southern rap. And

(59:54):
they've formed this little production company, Miami Boom Productions, who
in released a song called who Let the Dogs Out?
And the chorus of that song is remarkably similar to
the chorus that Ansel and Douglas used later. Miami Boom

(01:00:23):
Productions were the first people to set the concept to
a recorded medium, but though they recorded that hook in
even they did and created. Ben's sister also found proof
that years before anybody recorded this song, local high school
and even Little League teams were chanting who let the
Dogs Out? Before and after their games. And the earliest

(01:00:45):
that I've been able to find was from six. This
was the Austin Reagan Raiders, that's Austin, Texas, and their
team used the chant who let the Dogs Out? With
the barks afterwards, and I have like video evidence of
that from nine eight six, and then interviewing people who

(01:01:15):
were on that team, uh, it suggested that the phrase
was around probably tail end of nine four, and that's
the earliest I've been able to trace it back. So
it doesn't seem like we'll ever really know who came
up with the hook to who Let the Dogs Out?
It's just part of our collective conscious I suppose the

(01:01:36):
song has had a really long life, and at this
point I think i'd be surprised if I ever ran
into somebody who didn't know it. Kids who weren't even
born when the song came out still know the song
by the time they were in elementary school, and it
still gets played in stadiums. Several years ago, I had
the opportunity to meet a young man from Rwanda and
when he asked you what I did, I said that

(01:01:57):
I was in the record business. And he said, tell
me a wreck and you worked on? And I said, well,
I don't really know what records are popular in Rwanda.
He said, just name something, let's see if I know it.
So I said, I worked on a record called who
Let the Dogs Out? He started laughing. I said, why
are you laughing? He said, oh, come on, everyone in
Rwanda knows that song. That's the most famous song in

(01:02:19):
the world, and that pretty much sums it up. I
don't know if it's the most famous song of the world,
but it certainly is a song that will outlast me. Sure,
every once in a while it shows up on a
list of the worst records of all time. But a

(01:02:40):
lot of people love it. You'd even want a Grammy.
It's tight, it's colorful, it's infectious, and as we all
knew that day in the mastering studio when I pulled
the scratched up c D out of my bag, there
truly was magic in that record. That wraps up this

(01:03:01):
episode of Speed of Sound. Coming up on our next
episode of Speed of Sound, how did a fifteen year
old girl play a key role in bringing Beatlemania to America.
If you want to take a deeper dive into the
artists and songs you just heard, check out our curated
playlist at the Speed of Sound page on the I
Heart Apple Until next Time. You can find me on

(01:03:33):
Twitter at Stevie g Pro. Speed of Sound is executive
produced by Lauren Bright Pacheco, Noel Brown, and me. Taylor
shakogn is our supervising producer, editor and sound design. Additional
sound designed by Tristan McNeil. I'm Steve Greenberg. Until next time.
Keep listening from music. The movie Speed of Sound is

(01:03:56):
a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from
my Heart Radio, check out the I Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.