Hip-hopper-turned-sample-rocker Tim Fite says: Always replenish your blood supply, never clear your samples and never spend more than a buck.

"Hi, everybody," says a dark-haired man dressed in a pinstripe suit, a wicked stare and a slouch to match. "I'm Tim Fite, and I was born without blood." While this quizzical, Johnny Cash-like salutation gets only scattered applause at New York cabaret Joe's Pub, the herky-jerky singer is soon enchanting the crowd with Sesame Street antics such as asking the audience to help count fingers with him and telling a wild story about "the gentleman with itchy legs" (actually Fite, projected on a TV behind him), all in between Fite's wild-eyed potpourri of country, hip-hop and rock. After his 20-minute opening slot is up, the crowd is cheering for an encore. The exhausted singer okays another tune with the club, turns down his "blood machine" (an oversized boombox made of wood) and sings a touching rendition of his own "If You Please," which may surface someday on a collection of love songs. The thing about Fite's instant success is that it's really instantaneous: this is his first solo show.

Fite had a brief stint in an early-'00s major label hip-hop duo, which he now denounces as "shameful" and refuses to identify (although a cursory Googling reveals the truth). Now Fite has taken what he learned from hip-hop, notably sampling, and reinvented rock music from the bottom up—literally.

Seated at a dinner table in his Brooklyn apartment between painted urinals, modified toilet bowls and the occasional folded-up wheelchair, Fite twitches his eyebrows while explaining how he bought "bargain bin" CDs for the source material on his debut, Gone Ain't Gone (Anti-). Since he conceptualized his collage-rock process, he has bought up to 600 CDs, some for as little as a quarter. "I won't pay more than a dollar for anything to sample from. That's just not right," he says. "Sometimes I find CDs that I like so much, I can't sample them because it's so good. It's tough, because when you hear a good song, you like the good song. I'm looking for the good songs inside the good songs."

When Fite self-released the album, he didn't contact any of these dollar-bin dropouts, scribbling on the booklet, "Thank you for not pressing charges." But his new label, Anti-, insisted they clear the samples (in addition to keeping his thank you note). This became a daunting task for the label, accustomed to calling the majors, and now seeking contact with whozas, couldabeens and WTFs like Tim Ferguson And The Cousin Lovers or Trunk Federation.

"Business wastes a lot of people's time, and the bargain bin is the result," says Fite. "It's like, 'We printed too many of these CDs,' or 'The band wasn't good enough for our marketing plan,' or 'Our marketing plan wasn't good enough for this band.' Which is what I find a lot because there's a lot of great music in the bargain bin."

With the exception of one semi-known Nordic singer—whose identity is another Fite Club secret—all samples were cleared. For that song, based around a two-note riff ("There's only so many ways you can strum two chords in a slow-ass song"), Fite tapped friends Ben Kweller and Bonfire Madigan cellist Shive to fill it out, making it more—as Fite puts it, hitting his fist on his chest—"from the corazón."

Recently, in some act of cosmic irony, Fite saw his former band's album selling for half a penny on eBay, which bothered him only slightly. "You'd have to find another fucking CD to buy for a half a cent to actually pay for it with a check," he says, lurching forward. "It's beautiful to go to the bargain bin and rise from it like a phoenix, and then return to it most likely. I have the feeling Tim Fite will most likely find the bargain bin at some point. I can only dream."

But until he swan dives back into the company of his peers, he's at least had enough time at the bottom to reevaluate his motivations. His born-without-blood shtick and blood-and-bullets imagery represent what he feels are people's misspent inspirations. "No Good Here"—on which Fite samples forgotten Richmond college rockers the Seymores' "Arcade Boy" note-for-note, keeping the vocal melody and pumping blood into new lyrics—captures this theme. He sings about quitting every job in New York City and how his money just doesn't seem accepted anywhere. But within the psychology of Tim Fite, even if his money's not accepted, it's not the end. He just needs to refuel on motivation and conviction. That way, it's not really gone; hence, Gone Ain't Gone. Having been relegated to the bargain bin only to start fresh with a new identity (Tim Fite is a pseudonym), the boy born without blood, it seems, has gotten a transfusion.

"Not many songs get a second chance," he says, making a tidy metaphor for his own career. "Not many songs get a first chance, for Christ's sake."

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