Biv10 Records Part 2 | Markpain | Michael Bivins & 90s R&B and Creative Ambition | 168

Becoming UnDone® with Dr. Toby Brooks

The episode explores the rise and fall of Michael Bivens' BIV10 Records and the East Coast Family through the lens of artist-producer Mark Payne (formerly known as Mark Finesse). Host Dr. Toby Brooks traces how a young,

Key takeaways

• Mark Payne was mentored by producer Finesse in a rigorous 'boot camp' style that involved erasing unreleased tracks until they met exacting standards.
• Michael Bivens, only 23 when building BIV10 Records, managed Boyz II Men and BBD while simultaneously incubating dozens of artists under the East Coast Family umbrella.

Main topics

• BIV10 Records & East Coast Family ecosystem
• Early 90s R&B/hip-hop industry dynamics

Notable quotes

"I believe that with or without Mike, some way I would become successful."

Conclusion

The episode offers a nuanced look at how creative ecosystems can launch legends while leaving

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) This is Believe. One network. Every topic. Everywhere. Speaker 2 (0:10) This is Becoming Undone. Speaker 4 (0:34) I have a theory. Now, hear me out. For me and many people in my generation, Michael Bivens is like November 5th, 1955. Now, I realize that statement will probably make absolutely zero sense to most people for at least one reason. And for others, maybe even two reasons why it makes zero sense. So let me break it down. First, November 5th, 1955. Speaker 2 (1:04) Here's the red-letter date in the history of science. November 5th, 1955. Yes, of course. November 5th, 1955. What? I don't get what happened. That was the day I invented time travel. I remember it vividly. I was standing on the edge of my toilet, hanging a clock. The porcelain was wet. I slipped, hit my head on the edge of the sink. And when I came to, I had a revelation. A vision. A picture in my head. A picture of this. This is what makes time travel possible. The flux capacitor. Speaker 4 (1:39) As you just heard for yourself, that's the date in Back to the Future when Doc Brown falls off his toilet, cracks his head, and suddenly envisions the flux capacitor. It's also the date Marty McFly travels back to as the first human to move through time. And over the course of the trilogy, November 5th becomes this strange kind of nexus point, this place through which everything in the space-time continuum seems to flow. So if you're old enough to understand the Back to the Future reference, congratulations. You're halfway to understanding my metaphor or analogy or whatever. But Michael Bivens, maybe you know the name or at the very least you know of his work. He was a child star, a member of New Edition. He was a teen idol who grew up to become one third of Belbiv DeVoe, the guy who helped bring the world boys to men who would go on to become themselves the best selling R &B group of all time. But what you might not know is that before Puff Daddy and Bad Boy and before anybody was talking about cinematic universes filled with interconnected characters and stories, before the Internet made creative collaboration instant and global, Michael Bivens was building something. At the time, that was cutting edge and innovative and amazingly ambitious. Biv Entertainment, the East Coast family, and eventually Biv 10 Records. It was part record label, part management company, part talent incubator, part extended musical family. And for a few years in the early 90s, it seemed like Michael Bivens was everywhere. I was 16 years old in 1991. I was a high school sophomore. I'd just gotten my driver's license. I drove this 1985 Chevy pickup, had a home-built stereo system with a JVC CD player, a pair of 12-inch pile driver subs running off a 500-watt special edition amplifier that I had on layaway for a few months, had a graphic equalizer, tweeters mounted in the pillars, two-way components in the doors. It was cool. And what 16-year-old me loved most about that truck and that stereo was playing new music loud, like really loud. The problem was finding the music. I grew up in the middle of nowhere in Southern Illinois. In a pre-Spotify, pre-iTunes, pre-every song ever recorded in your pocket era, I had basically two passable radio stations in my estimation. 96STO out of Evansville, Indiana, and Rockin' Radio CILFM 101.5 out of Carbondale, Illinois. They played mostly contemporary rock and pop and not a whole lot else, but it was better than The Country and the classic stations that were the alternatives. Most of the music that was reaching me was whatever somebody else had decided was popular enough for rural Southern Illinois radio. But that all changed when I got a CD player for Christmas just before I turned 16. Shortly after that, I did what seemingly every teenager with a mailbox and questionable financial judgment eventually did. I joined Columbia House. 12 CDs for one cent. And then BMG, I think that was like six CDs for free. Of course, you were required to buy more albums later on, something much closer to retail price, maybe even a little bit more. And every month they'd send you some featured selection that you would automatically buy unless you remembered to mail back the little tiny card telling them. That you didn't, in fact, want the new Wilson Phillips album for $26 or whatever, plus shipping and handling, which in 1991, I looked it up. It's like 50 bucks today or something. Just describing this business model makes me feel like I'm 175 years old. There was postage, mail order CDs, handwritten response cards and automatic purchases. Literally none of this probably makes sense if you're a listener under the age of 35. But let me tell you something, that business model might not be legal in 2026, but it changed my life in 1991. Speaker 4 (5:59) Because all of a sudden I wasn't dependent on two radio stations that just happened to be closest to my house to tell me what I should hear. As a kid without cable, I didn't even have MTV to do that. No, friends, Columbia House and BMG gave me something I never really had before. choice, and agency, and Speaker 3 (6:21) access. And Speaker 4 (6:23) one of the first CDs I ordered through that 12 for a penny Columbia House deal was Bell Bibb DeVoe's Poison. It had been released in 1990. But because I'd grown up in the sticks without MTV and without radio stations playing much black music, I didn't know Bell Bibb DeVoe as three former members of New Edition. I didn't know Ricky Bell. I didn't know Ronnie DeVoe. And I didn't know Michael Bivens. To me, at the time, BBD was just three guys on the cover of a CD that a friend had let me hear that I had loved. Speaker 2 (7:02) Mm. Speaker 4 (7:05) Once I started pulling on that thread, I kept finding more music that I loved. Another group, another artist, another CD, another name buried somewhere in the liner notes. And eventually, I started to notice something. Michael Bivens was everywhere. Belle Bib DeVoe, Another Bad Creation, Boys to Men, MC Brains, The East Coast Family, Biv Entertainment, and then Biv 10 Records. Speaker 4 (7:44) It was like every musical road I was traveling somehow passed through the same intersection. November 5th, 1955. Speaker 4 (7:54) I just didn't know it yet. And that, my friend, is where this series really begins. Because more than three decades later, I started wondering what happened to all those artists whose names and faces once filled those CD booklets, cassette inserts, music videos, magazine ads, and Biv 10 compilations. Some of them became stars. Some of them even became superstars. and others seem to disappear. Without a doubt, some never got the break that they thought was coming, or honestly, that they probably rightfully deserved. But every one of them had a story. So I started trying to find them. To deepen the whole Michael Bivens is November 5th, 1955 analogy even further, five years ago, I wasn't a podcaster. Matter of fact, I didn't even really listen to podcasts at the time. And in a memory that I don't really have full details about, sometime in 2021, I just on a whim randomly searched online for a group called White Guys. Speaker 4 (9:05) Why was I Googling white guys? W-H-Y-T-E-G-Y-Z-E, I think. But why was I Googling their name in 2021? Speaker 4 (9:17) Absolutely no idea. I just was. What I do remember instead, with remarkable clarity, of all things, is being a high school kid, working in the student council snack bar during lunch in 1992 as a high school junior, and talking to one of my best friends, Mark Jones, who had recently bought the East Coast Family Volume 1 CD. And inside the liner notes was a group of, well, white guys. And we laughed at the spelling of their name. Was it Witgizzy? Was it White Guys? What was it? But for some inexplicable reason, nearly 30 years later, I decided I needed to know whatever happened to those guys. Those White Guys. And at first I didn't find much. But then I found Dave Holmes. More specifically, I found his 10-part limited series podcast, Waiting for Impact, where not only did Dave have a similar compulsion to find out what happened to those guys, he actually did a deep dive, true crime style, 10-part passion project on them. Speaker 1 (10:25) I'm Dave Holmes, and there's a pop culture mystery that I have not been able to get out of my head for decades. It's the summer of 1991. If you're a young person, which I was, you're glued to MTV or VH1 or BET. These are cable channels that play music videos. But they all played a new music video that summer. It was the first music video for the vocal group Boyz II Men. It was called Motown Philly. Speaker 1 (10:58) There's a lot going on in the music video for Motown Philly. Throughout it, there's a photographer in a short black skirt. Taking pictures of the groups in what a big photo album tells us is the East Coast family. But it's what happens two minutes and 38 seconds into the Motown Philly video that I cannot shake. Five young guys in five white button-down shirts, each with his own necktie, stand in a loose semicircle around Michael Bivens. Their name glows above their heads. Sudden impact. It's the promise of something new. It's an introduction to a young group who you know are going to be huge. What Sudden Impact did next was disappear. Speaker 1 (11:44) And it's not an exaggeration to say I have wondered about Sudden Impact ever since. I'm going to find them. I'm going to track those guys down one by one, necktie by necktie. I'm going to get the story of Sudden Impact. Speaker 4 (12:02) No exaggeration here. Dave Holmes changed my life. Now, Dave's storytelling is otherworldly. I've never encountered someone better. The only person even close, Rob Harvilla, 60 songs that explain the 90s and so on and so forth until he gets done telling those stories. But either way, Dave's storytelling, unmatched. His ability to interview people, then weave their voices together with history, context, humor, and mystery. and his own personal connections to the story is masterful. It's chef's kiss. If I ever teach a class on podcasting, both Waiting for Impact and his follow-up effort, Who Killed the Video Star? about the rise and fall of MTV, will be required listening. I still go back and listen to episodes again to get inspired about how I can be better as a journalist and as a podcaster. So for me, Waiting for Impact wasn't just informative. It wasn't just entertaining, but it was both of those things. It was my first exposure to the world of podcasting. And it convinced me that this was a medium I absolutely had to learn. I wanted to become a podcaster. My first attempt came shortly after my daughter, Brennan, left for college. We decided to record a show together called Better Every Week with Brennan and Toby Brooks. It taught me some of the basics and gave me a chance to learn by doing. But after four episodes, it became harder and harder for a busy college freshman and her dad to keep meeting up and scheduling interviews and doing that kind of thing. So eventually we stopped. A few months later, I tried again. By then, I'd been spending a lot of time talking. with retired and former athletes, and their stories were incredible. And underneath the sports stories was something a lot more human. Failure, loss, and transition, and adversity, and identity. And the question of what happens when the thing you thought would define your life suddenly doesn't anymore. I knew there was something there. Something bigger than sports. Something about becoming better because of the things that nearly undid us. And Becoming Undone was born. Speaker 4 (14:20) 16 episodes in, Dave Holmes was kind enough to answer my request and come on the show himself as a guest. And since then, he's remained an incredible inspiration and a supporter along the way. So Dave, if you're listening, I can't thank you enough. And what you're listening to right now is episode 168. I've been working steadily on this show for nearly four full years. And there have been times I wanted to quit. There were moments when I almost did. And there is a beautiful irony, my friend, about realizing that a show built around navigating failure and adversity and reinvention required me to navigate those things myself just to keep making it, to push through to my own other side. Now, no brag, but today Becoming Undone routinely appears among Apple's top-ranked shows in multiple categories, and it's reached audiences I couldn't have ever imagined. when I sat down to record those first few episodes. But I don't tell you that to brag. I tell you that because of the lineage. November 5th, 1955. Speaker 4 (15:32) Michael Bivens built Biv 10. Biv 10 signed Sudden Impact, who would become White Guys. White Guys became the subject of an obsessive search by a former MTV VJ, Dave Holmes, and that search became Waiting for Impact. And waiting for impact inspired me to become a podcaster. And that decision eventually became Becoming Undone, a project that has become, if it's not my life's work, it's certainly one of the most meaningful and gratifying parts of it. So somehow, more than 30 years after I first encountered his name, my own timeline runs through the Michael Bivens nexus too. Which brings me to what this series actually is. Because this isn't really a series about Michael Bivins. Not exactly. And without a doubt, it is not an attempt to discredit or malign him. Quite the contrary. Now, make no mistake, there are going to be some difficult stories here. Some near misses. Some careers that almost happened. Records that never came out. Artists who could see stardom just over the horizon, but never quite reach it. But that's not the point. The point is what came from all of it. The relationships, the memories, the music, the people these young artists became, and the incredible ripple effects of one ambitious creative experience more than three decades later. This series is about the universe that grew around Michael Bivens. The people who were there, the artists who almost made it, and the ones who did. The music that got released and the music that didn't. and what it felt like to be a young artist standing inside of one of the most unusual creative experiments of the early 1990s. We already began that journey with Hayden Heide a few episodes back, but today we're going deeper into the Biv 10 story, because one of those young artists was a teenager who went by the name of Mark Payne, one half of Mark Finesse, and his road to Michael Bivens' world begins exactly where so many from that era seem to begin. With a kid, and a dream, and a bit of luck, and somebody opening the door. which is even more remarkable when you remember one important detail. Michael Bivens was only 23 years old himself. So this is the story of Mark Payne. And if you've listened this long, I guess now is probably as good a time as any to tell you who I am. My name is Dr. Toby Brooks. Today I'm a professor, a speaker, a podcaster, but maybe most of all a storyteller. But in 1990, I was a fan. And by 1992, I was a 17-year-old kid holding a new CD in his hands, fascinated by what the future might hold for this incredible collection of young artists that Michael Bivens had assembled. This series is my attempt to share and honor their stories. The Biv-10 Bunch. The East Coast Family. A musical universe that for a brief moment in the early 1990s seemed like it might become something massive. Friend, you're listening to Becoming Undone, and this is Lasting Impact. The East Coast Family, Biv10 Records, and Michael Bivens. A Becoming Undone passion project. Speaker 4 (18:52) Becoming Undone is a podcast for those who dare bravely, risk mightily, and grow relentlessly. Join me, Toby Brooks, as I invite a new guest each week to examine how high achievers can transform from falling apart to falling into place. My guest today is Mark Payne, who's an artist, songwriter, producer. His roots go way back in the music industry to one of the most recognizable eras in 90s R &B. Mark was half of the group Mark Finesse, part of Michael Bivens' Biff 10 Records East Coast family. alongside names like Boys to Men, Another Bad Creation, BBD, 702. And Mark Vanessa appeared on the East Coast Family Movement in the One For All For One video. And interesting trivia, also a producer of the music we use in this show. So, Mark, thanks so much for joining me today. You're welcome. You're welcome. Speaker 3 (19:39) I appreciate that. That's a really nice introduction. I appreciate it. Speaker 4 (19:43) Yeah, well. I mean, your credentials stand on their own. This all really started way back when. One of the shows that inspired this show was Dave Holmes' Waiting for Impact, where he does a deep dive on the Sudden Impact guys. And Hayden was interviewed for that. There were a couple of other BIFTAN artists. And then finally he got to the Sudden Impact guys. I mean, full transparency, that was interesting to me, but there were so many other Biv 10 artists that I, as a young high school kid growing up, I'm like, I can't wait for all these acts to drop their CDs, their albums. And then it never really happened. So I'm really interested to get into your story and then hopefully making connections with other former Biv 10 artists to tell their story as well. Speaker 3 (20:28) I always like to start at the beginning. When you were a kid, what did you want to be growing up and why? Well, I never really had like a set skill or what I wanted to be as a child. It just, everything just happened. You know what I mean? Like it just happened. When I was eight years old, my grandmother decided I was born in the Bronx, New York. So when I was a kid, my grandmother decided that she wanted to leave New York and go to the Virgin Islands when I was eight years old. And when we got there, jobs were like. Scared. She couldn't find any jobs at all. You know, very small place. And so the only way to survive was you have to be very creative or you have to come up with something. You know what I mean? To make money. So my uncle, he was an artist as well. He played the bongos. So his creativity caused him to create a bongo with a plastic bucket. And I took a metal can and made a cowbell with it. So that's how we survived. Speaker 4 (21:30) So Speaker 3 (21:30) that kind of like forced me, you know what I mean? Into more of the music scene, being a musician. But I wasn't aware of it. The only thing was just survival at that point. You know what I mean? Yeah. So it wasn't really like they said, oh, I want to be a musician or you know what I mean? Or yeah, this is what's going to happen in my life. It was just more or less live, go, live, go, live, go. Speaker 4 (21:54) Right. Well, such humble beginnings, but. I mean, you burst on the scene as a young artist with Biv 10. So take me back to Mark Finesse. How did you and your co-creator come together? And how in the world did two young guys find themselves connected with a name like Michael Bivens and Biv 10 during that incredible early 90s run? Speaker 3 (22:14) Right. So Finesse and I met at a mutual friend in Brooklyn when I first moved to Brooklyn. The guy owned a studio and I would go to the guy's house to cut records. The guy would show me how to put music on wax. So I was intrigued with that. And I was like, wow, how do you do that? How do you put music on wax? So he was Finesse's friend. They were friends. But Finesse never came to his house when I was there. So one day I went to his house. His name was Monty, Monty Blue. I went to Monty's house and Finesse was there making music. And when I tell you it's talent like you couldn't imagine. This guy was playing two keyboards at the same time. And I was like, there's no way he's playing two keyboards. So I was very intrigued because I was trying to learn how to make music at that time as well. And by watching Finesse make music, I felt like he would be the greatest mentor for me learning how to