Jake Bass Says the Drums on “Kim” Are Not Led Zeppelin, and He Got Apple Music to Take the Credit Off

Fifty-four minutes inside F.B.T. Studios, where Eminem was signed in 1995. The headline claim is a credit correction. The buried one is a date.

On Friday, September 4, 2026, a YouTube channel called The Eric Barber posted a 54-minute sit-down with Jake Bass filmed inside F.B.T. Studios in Detroit. Jake is the son of Jeff Bass and nephew of Mark Bass, the brothers who signed Marshall Mathers in 1995 and produced almost everything he made before Dr. Dre existed in his life. It is the most detailed thing anyone from that room has said on camera in years, and almost none of it has been reported.

The full interview. The "Kim" section starts at 44:25, the Infinite section at 45:31. Quotes below are from this tape.

The credit correction

Asked for his favourite Eminem records, Jake names "Rock Bottom," then "White America," then stops on the Marshall Mathers LP closer.

"That was a record that was done in 30 minutes, too, by the way," he says. "Marshall did his vocals like that in one take. My dad did his in one take. My uncle actually played live drums on that one. A lot of people think it's a sample. It's not. It is not Led Zeppelin. It's a real drum kit."

Then the part worth writing down: "I even had Apple Music change that, cuz they said they sampled Led Zeppelin. They did not." He is not calm about it. "It just pissed me off because I know the truth. Just because they put a microphone in the hallway doesn't mean they stole the drums from John Bonham. My uncle played those drums."

The hallway line is the giveaway: Bonham's sound on "When the Levee Breaks" came out of a stairwell, and Jake is saying his uncle chased the technique, not the tape. The paperwork is on his side. "Kim" is written by Marshall Mathers, Jeff Bass and Mark Bass, produced by F.B.T., mixed by Dr. Dre. No Led Zeppelin writer, publisher or clearance appears in the liner notes, on Apple Music today, or on WhoSampled. Genius is the odd one out, carrying a "When the Levee Breaks" entry on its samples page while the Q&A on its lyrics page quotes Jake denying it. The myth lives in the fan databases, not the credits.

"Kim," official audio. Six minutes and eighteen seconds, built in thirty.

How the Infinite tape got off the shelf

The second long section is about the 2016 remix of "Infinite," still the only officially licensed piece of Eminem's 1996 debut on streaming. Jake gives the reason the album never got there: "a lot of samples on it."

His pitch was to rebuild the title track from scratch rather than clear anything: "playing everything original, but making it sound like it was from '96, with my piano and whatnot." His father heard it and said "holy shit, this could be it." Then he was told to go get the tape.

"It was actually a delicate thing to handle that tape, cuz you can only touch it so many times, and the process of converting it digitally, you could mess the whole thing up very easily." The transfer was done by Nick King, whom Jake identifies as the son of the late Steve King, the engineer who mixed Eminem's records alongside Jeff Bass and died in 2014. Jake got the original 24-track, lifted the 1996 vocal off it, and dropped it onto his new bed. "I was like, holy shit, this sounds old, but fresh."

He buried his father's spare guitar parts underneath "to make it sound like an old horn," and had his uncle mix it in the same building: "a true F.B.T. production 20 years later." The number he gives for it has not appeared anywhere before. "We sold almost 30,000 downloads in the first week, which is insane. For one song."

The single arrived November 17, 2016, five days after the album turned 20, alongside a short documentary cut from Jake's own home footage.

"Partners In Rhyme," posted by 8 Mile Style on November 17, 2016. The archive footage Jake describes pulling out of boxes.

The date nobody checked

Right after the download figure, Jake says: "Next year's the 30th anniversary. So hopefully we can make some more magic."

Infinite came out on November 12, 1996. Its 30th anniversary is November 12, 2026, nine weeks from now. Had this been recorded in September 2026, "next year" would be wrong by a year.

It was not recorded in September 2026. Two markers place it in December 2025. The interviewer says he watched D12 play "just under a month ago, over in Ferndale," and D12's only Ferndale date was The Magic Bag on November 22, 2025. And Jake calls the D12 album "coming out next year" still untitled, with the group "doing this promo right now" asking fans to name it and sorting "thousands of responses." D12 announced the title at the end of December 2025 and released D12 Forever Vol. 1 on June 19, 2026.

So the tape is roughly nine months old and went up last Friday. That makes nothing in it false. It makes one line live rather than stale: when Jake Bass said he hoped to "make some more magic" for the 30th, he meant a date that is now two months out, not fourteen. Whether anything is coming he does not say, and we are not claiming it is. But the man who built the 20th anniversary release out of the master tapes said on camera that he wanted to do it again.

The F.B.T. Remix: Jake's instrumental under a vocal cut in 1996.

The rest of the room

F.B.T. stands for Funky Bass Team, and it was Mark, not Jeff, who found Eminem. "He was the one who heard him on the radio and called up the radio station and told him, hey, who the hell was that guy? I need to get his information." Marshall was in the studio the next day. Jake was in elementary school and watched from a corner of the room: "I got to see the Infinite project be put together, come out and not work." Same with the Slim Shady EP. Then the Slim Shady LP worked, and the studio dropped everyone else: "It was just Marshall 24/7."

The other Eminem interview to surface this month was the Shade 45 Back To School special. This is the other half of it, told by the family in the room.

Sources. Quotes are from "Jake Bass Talks F.B.T. Studios, Eminem's Infinite, & The Bass Brothers Legacy," posted by The Eric Barber on September 4, 2026, running 54:03. Credits for "Kim" are from the liner notes, cross-checked via Discogs, Apple Music, WhoSampled and Genius. Infinite released November 12, 1996; the F.B.T. Remix and "Partners In Rhyme" both landed November 17, 2016. Steve King died June 3, 2014. D12 played The Magic Bag in Ferndale on November 22, 2025 and released D12 Forever Vol. 1 on June 19, 2026. The 30,000 download figure is Jake Bass's own. All four embeds are rightsholder uploads.