Domino sat down with Dregs One on the History of the Bay podcast to share his story — from his humble beginnings making beats in a room behind San Francisco’s legendary Groove Merchant record store, to meeting A&R Dante Ross, linking up with Oakland’s Hieroglyphics, and eventually becoming their manager as well as one of their core producers.
He covers everything from their success as major-label darlings to their decision to go independent and pioneer the burgeoning online space of the mid-1990s through Hieroglyphics.com.
Going Independent
Dregs One: “You’re on major labels, you have successful singles, records, albums. And then Hieroglyphics gets dropped from the major labels, and then you guys take it independent and decide to start the Hieroglyphics Imperium record label.
What was the decision and process behind making that transition?”
Domino: “First, Casual and Souls of Mischief got dropped. Del was still signed. Cats were still doing songs, so I had this idea: I made this cassette tape of what everyone was doing at the time, and I was like, ‘We should do a whole Hiero crew album,’ and basically show what our vision is — a proof of concept.
We’ll put this album out on our own label, and ultimately we’ll get Souls signed again, and Casual signed again. And we’re going to springboard Del’s forthcoming major-label promotion for Stress the World on Elektra (released independently as Future Development), so when Del’s doing promo, he’s going to talk about this indie record we’ve got. So that was kind of our plan, you know?
So then Del gets dropped from Elektra.
And then we were like, ‘OK, let’s put out our own thing.’ And again, the plan was once we show this, we’ll have our own thing, but then everyone can get signed again, because we’ll show we still got it goin’ on.
But what ended up happening was, we had so much success and made so much money doing it independently, we were like, why get signed? We were touring more than we did before, we were making more money, we were in control of our careers — our destiny. We had Hieroglyphics.com, we were early on the website stuff: we were selling merchandise online, selling T-shirts.
And so, we realized this was the way to go. And we never revisited the ‘let’s get everyone signed again.’”
Touring Indie
Domino: “When we first started touring after we went indie, there was no touring circuit. There was no underground thing. I would call the radio DJs I knew from my connections at the major labels and ask, ‘Who does the shows in your area?’
We didn’t have a booking agent or anything. It was just me calling, ‘Who puts on the shows?’ and then negotiating with them directly. We went around the country doing like three shows a week, but the rest of the time we were going to radio stations, going to the mall, and going to record stores, just trying to let people know.
By the time we got to New York, I got a call from a guy, Peter Schwartz, who worked for William Morris. He goes, ‘I’ve got my own agency.’ And I thought, You’re just the guy I want to talk to. Because I was booking shows myself, but I wanted a tour where we were playing every night — not one show here, one show there; that’s how it was.
So then we got a booking agent, and we really toured hard.”
The Website
Domino: “Shout out to Stinke — the guy who had the Hieroglyphics fan website first — that Tajai discovered. We connected with him and made it official. We were so early in the website game — I think we had a website before IBM, not to mention most music groups.
But we were so early on that part of the internet that it became a big part of getting the word out to people who knew us from the major labels and were like, ‘What happened to them?’ Our site really started to build up this new 3rd Eye Vision record we were about to come out with.”
Dregs One: “I think a lot of artists have not caught up to that [in 2025]. That kind of grassroots: calling radio stations yourself, interacting with the fans, booking the tour on a grind. Looking back 25 years since that started, y’all have that cult fanbase. That’s why you see people with Hiero tattoos. People be like, ‘Hiero! You talking about The Bay? Hiero!’ Not everybody has that fanbase.”
New Music
Much more is available in the full 1-hour, 41-minute interview, including exciting news about new music from Domino and Del the Funky Homosapien.
Check it out, and thank you to Dregs One for another dope podcast with the Hiero Crew.