HOME FEATURES COLUMNS FILM LIT MUSIC BLOG CONTACT		INVISIBLE JUKEBOX :: STEINSKI Dave Tompkins and I did this Invisible Jukebox with Steinski for The Wire in March 2002. In 1983, Steve Stein was just a thirtysomething advertising executive with a serious love for the new sound of his native New York streets: HipHop. He and friend Douglas DiFranco (aka Double Dee) came across an ad for a remix contest presented by the up-and-coming Tommy Boy label, and a weekend later the two had become local legends getting props from Afrika Bambaataa for their frenetic winner, known today as "Lesson 1: The Payoff Mix". Their subsequent work - "Lesson 2: The James Brown Mix", "Lesson 3: The History Of Hip-Hop" and Steinski's solo "The Motorcade Sped On" - has become HipHop legend, laying out the blueprint for the cut 'n' paste narrative styles championed today by artists like Coldcut, DJ Shadow and Kid Koala. Born and raised in Mount Vernon, Stein attended the tiny, now defunct Franconia University in New Hampshire, which not only got him out of Vietnam, but also gave him access to some of the freakiest jazz and rock sounds of the day (as well as a pretty good story about the whole student body and faculty showing up to a soccer game on acid). After bumming around for the larger part of the 1970s, he settled down in a cushy advertising job in the early 80s that finally gave him enough spending money to buy music. Lots of music. While it's been nearly 20 years since Steinski and Double Dee released their three seminal "Lessons", Stein is painfully modest about his accomplishments. "When DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist came here, they took pictures of each other holding the 24 track boxes of our mixes. Flattered? I'm just peein' on the floor, I'm so flattered. It's astonishing," he exclaims. After spending much of the 1990s building his one-man advertising company, Steinski is back with a clutch of exciting new projects, including a jawdropping mix sequence for Ninja Tune's Solid Steel broadcast, collaborative work with Amon Tobin, and an album of 'duets' with Coldcut, Afrika Bambaataa, Z-Trip and DJ Food. There have even been "exploratory conversations" regarding a new, rock 'n' roll version of "Lesson". The Jukebox took place in the recording studio of Stein's midtown office, still chilly from Stein's efforts to air out all the smoke that had accumulated from the night before. John & Ernest Super Fly Meets Shaft 7-inch (Rainy Wednesday) 1972 [Listens to entire song] Yeah that was great. [Island A&R man] Joel Weber played it for me once. [Imitates record)] "Super Fly and President behind closed doors - holding hands and making plans." That's a nice piece of work. That's a total rip from [William] Buchanan and [Dickie] Goodman [record producers active from the 50s whose spoof recordings utilised collagist 'break-in' and splicing techniques]. Actually, it is Goodman. Though the record's credited to John & Ernest, it's actually a Dick Goodman production with some guy named Sal Passantino. No Buchanan though. Those two guys started that period [of cut and paste records], unless somebody comes along and says, 'Oh look, [something else] was around in 1950'. I heard the very first one - "The Flying Saucer"- on a jukebox in a Chinese restaurant in Mt Vernon when I was about five or six. It got turned into a pool hall. [Imitates record] "This is your on the spot reporter coming to you from downtown, but wait, there's a flying saucer landingá" and they have Smiley Lewis's "I Hear You Knocking" and all kinds of shit in there. In the 1950s, that was a thingá people worried about flying saucers and shit. We've sampled it a couple of times: "The flying saucers are real!" Douglas [DiFranco, aka Double Dee] and I took a couple of things out of those. I have a whole bunch of bootleg records of Buchanan and Goodman-type stuff. Miles Davis "In A Silent Way (Rehearsal)" from The Complete In A Silent Way Sessions (Columbia Legacy) 1968 [Waits until Miles's horn comes in] I heard this period of Miles for the first time when I was in college in 1971. It made a tremendous impression. Up until that point, jazz was either Wes Montgomery - and I felt I was being extremely daring listening to Wes Montgomery - or jazz was like ([beatboxes a bebop pattern] beboppy type shit, or squarer than that. [Hearing this] was like, 'Oh, this is jazz? This is nice!' It opened up all the limits all of a sudden. Part of the genius of this record is Teo Macero's production. Were you aware of the tape splicing when you were getting into this stuff? I didn't know about Teo Macero and his idea of, 'You guys just record and we'll make it on a 24 track [sic] afterwards'. Oh, I see, that's the point behind this selection. I didn't know about that stuff until I got into advertising [in the late 70s]. Aside from buying drugs occasionally, the only thing I wanted to do was buy records and books, and I would read about these things. That's when I started hearing, 'Right, Miles would go into the studio and Teo would just go at it and put these long dissolves on stuff, and OK, we got a 45 minute record!' It was fascinating. It can be argued that you and DiFranco, had a similar approach in the studio, manipulating tape and splicing various sources. Was the stuff Macero doing influential at all? In terms of cut 'em up stuff, Buchanan & Goodman were a much stronger influence. I remember being five or six in a restaurant hearing Buchanan & Goodman and thinking, 'Wow, this stuff is so exciting! Wham bam bam bam bam!' It was a lot like the radio when I grew up, I loved it. This stuff [points to Miles CD] didn't really impinge on me. Can you describe how different the radio was back then? The critical radio stations when I was growing up were WMCA - where the disc jockeys as a group were described as "The Good Guys" - there was WABC and WINS, where Murray The K was. It was classic Top 40 radio, the DJs would have 15 cartridges cued up with advertisements, sound effects, songs, trainwrecks, whatever they had sounds of. They'd be pumping away at this stuff like the mighty Wurlitzer, just bang-bang-bang. It was very exciting radio, and the pace and feel and excitement and the 'not knowing what was going on but knowing it was gonna be exciting', that was a big part of my listening to the radio. I guess another part of it was that at that point the Top 40 wasn't so much in the death grip of record companies as it is now; at the same time as The Beatles, there was Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole and Louie Armstrong, you had all kinds of different shit breaking on the radio. There was no particular relation between those things, as opposed to the current situation where 'This is what the corporations want to push'. I got used to a wide variation presented in this 'harum-scarum' method. So what do you think of the argument that places, say, The Invisibl Skratch Piklz and DJ Shadow on a continuum as descendents of what more avant garde cats like Macero or Stockhausen were doing? Working pretty hard, aren't they? Drawing the line is tough. It seems to me like it's the same urge that's coming up in people, it's just the time and facilities available when that urge shows up. Stockhausen and them cats have the urge, and this is what comes out of it then. Then the next group of people to get the urge could be Buchanan & Goodman, but it's a completely different setting so they do it that way. Then the urge comes up with The Skratch Piklz and them cats, and it happens that way. You're tracing the urge more than you're tracing 'The Skratch Piklz-knowing about Stockhausen'. I mean, yes, [Macero] is in many ways a pioneer, but for me it was Buchanan & Goodman, they were doing it long before him. Nothing against Teo, his shit is fabulous. Tranx Lux Big Apple Noise 12-inch (Master Mix) 1983 I think I played one of these. Is this one of Began Cekic's records? Sure, I remember this. He was turning these out of his garage in Brooklyn. [Cekic was a kind of early mix tycoon, putting out a lot of electro megamixes and remakes, as well as Tee Scott's early disco cuts, on his B.C. and One Way labels. He was allegedly involved with the Big Apple Production mixes, though the nervy, breakbeat-y quality of those mixes seem different from this one.] Were these records influential for you and Douglas? Some. Not as much with me as with other people, maybe The Latin Rascals and people like that. I generally find this stuff not quite as funky as I would have liked. A lot of the stuff coming out at the time, I listened to it and thought it was pretty mechanical. I listened to a lot of this stuff because I was buying everything that was coming out, but I never thought I'd want to make a record like that. Douglas's abilities were such that he didn't need a basic electronic track to go up against. He could just make the records flow into each other seamlessly, and it was like, 'OK, if we don't need that extra superstructure, then why have it?' He could make the records sound good, so the segues weren't strong records going into weak records or very loud and then not very loud. Douglas is a genius in the studio, and that's why a lot of our records sounded the way they did and not like things like this. There were a lot of electro mixes coming out in the early 1980s, but you seem to draw a line between what they were doing and what you and DiFranco were doing. How would you characterise that difference? A lot of this stuff uses a more electronic beat. You can hear the filters working on this stuff and you can hear the synths. With our stuff, we would take instrumental tracks that didn't sound very much like this [808 drum machines phasing away in the background], it was just our taste. We would loop the two bars of the drummer going such and such and put two or three things on top of that, as opposed to this. Also our records were more conceived of like a five minute sprint; they had a beginning, a middle, and end. They went up and down. Records like these were more conceived to be mix elements. You can move into it from another record, move out, they're more regular and the overall feel is the same. Our stuff tended to be a little crazier, more left turns, more [sneezes out a Looney Tunes cuckoo sound]. Junior "Mama Used to Say" 7-inch (Mercury) 1981 I love this record, man. It's such a lovely, big sounding party record, even though his voice has a slightly operatic, over the top quality. [Emulates Junior hitting the climactic high note] Goddamn, he's got that note and he's gonna hold onto it! The 12" of this had a great cover, with the Martini glass, I loved that! This was one of the fun moments of "Lesson 2", catching Junior mid-throttle before cutting to the B-Boys. Did you and Douglas map out the songs beforehand? No. Just boxes of records. Shit man, I can't plan my life, much less plan a record. Really? Did you have a lot of experience with mixes? No. We were just farting around, we would occasionally rent a piece of equipment and fuck around. We were ready to do something with a beginning and finish, so it was good that the contest came along. A friend of ours was working at a producer for CBS Records. He came in one day with a copy of Billboard and he said, 'Here's this contest, you guys should enter it." It was Tommy Boy's 'Hey Mr DJ' contest. It was a contest to make a five minute megamix using anything you wanted and remix this record, it was basically for home DJs. So we said, 'OK, let's do it this weekend, that'll be fun'. We went to the Roxy Friday night; on Saturday Douglas came over to my house and we loaded in a whole bunch of records and went up to his studio. We knuckled down and worked till real late. The next morning we came back in and finished it. It was one turntable and an eight track tape deck. I can't mix; neither can Douglas. We couldn't step to the most amateur San Francisco kid. How was the record distributed? At first it was just a reel-to-reel tape that was sent out to a dozen radio stations, and that's when it really started to get hot. In Philadelphia, kids were taping the mix when it came on - you'd hear the end of the DJ's rap going into the mix going into the commercial - and selling them on the street for 20 bucks. I knew a guy in England who told me, 'Oh yeah, we paid 60 quid for one of those cassettes and we were playing it in our club.' Afrika Bambaataa/Afrika Islam/Jazzy Jay (allegedly) "Fusion Beats Volume 2" (Bozo Meko) early 80s Back in the days of the manual, mechanical pause buttons. This is the Bambaataa thing on Bozo Meko, "Fusion Beats". It was a pause-button edit, it was astonishing! Can you explain the pause-button edit? That's if all you have is one cassette machine and one turntable. A mechanical pause button is one that holds the tension on the tape and pauses the motor and everything so that it's basically ready to break. It's holding its breath. If you put it in a record and disengage the pause at exactly the moment the beat comes through, you can do loops and transitions. This is pretty primitive shit. You have to be dead-on at the right time. God bless people who did records like that. From what I understand, The Latin Rascals started out like that. I was at a conference where Afrika Islam was talking about this. I think they just recorded it to cassette. It's a megamix of James Brown, [The Mohawks'] "Champ" - this is the first time I heard Dyke & The Blazers. That's how I got all these original 45s - after hearing "Fusion Beats". That's why I got so excited when I heard that Sonny Hopson record [referring to Philly Archives' 2000 Sonny Hopson: The Mighty Burner, a collection of live broadcasts featuring the famed late-1960s Philly DJ who would "rap" over songs and commercials] - I was like, 'What?! The break [from Dyke's "Let A Woman Be A Woman"] is longer!' It was another one of those decisions you make as a record collector that you've got to have this stuff, because you need to have as much of it as possible to sort of represent what was around. The way you and Douglas did your mixes was pretty laborious, but did you ever try pause-tapes? I wasn't DJing then. When I did pause mixes, it wasn't like looping breaks. It was more like Buchanan & Goodman - fast-cutting one thing over another. I hadn't yet gotten into that vibe of, 'Yeah, right man, that loop is great, let's just make that go longer.' It took me a while to get up the courage to buy two turntables and a mixer so I could go to the Roxy [the NYC rollerskating rink that hosted a pioneering HipHop weekly] and listen to this shit and come home and try to do something about it while I still had the fever. Master Jay & Michael Dee "TSOB" 12-inch (TSOB) 1980 Oh yeah, that's a hard record! Syn-drumsá I like that! [imitates some guy farting around in the studio discovering synth sounds] 'Whoopee! Hey, electric drums!' That's the kind of thing that makes me wish I'd dug a little deeper back in the day. What was it like back in the day? You just mentioned your old days going to clubs like the Roxy. What was the vibe like? The sound system was fabulous. In the very beginning, the DJ was down on the floors so you could just stand there and D.ST would be mixing six inches from you! As the crowds were larger, they had Bam [Bambaataa] and [Jazzy] Jay up on a raised platform. It wasn't till later that they started using the rollerskating booth. They opened as a Friday-only rap club around 1982. It was a real democratic atmosphere. There were the ubiquitous Japanese and French film crews, lots of kids who were working at MTV and places like that, lots of people from uptown, downtown hipster types. It was a really nice mix. Everybody always got in. There was none of this picking people out of the crowd. It was, 'OK, everybody line up over here and we're gonna let everybody in ten at a time.' After the contest, we were royalty. It was fucking unbelievable the places we went. Jellybean's booth at the Funhouse. We were hanging in the front of the clown face with Jellybean, some serious shit here. It was a blast. Do you remember meeting Bambaataa for the first time? Oh yeah, of course - who wouldn't? After we had won the contest, Monica [Lynch, former Tommy Boy exec and one-third of the staff back then] took us to the Roxy - breezed right through the line. We were standing by the booth and Bam was just up there playing, he leans in and waves. She points at us and says, 'These are the guys who did that mix!' His eyebrows went up and he leans down with his big hands and says, 'Nice to meet you guys, good work!' Of course at that point, we were still meeting everybody for the first time and I think everyone was still getting a kick out of it, like, 'Oh, they're old and they're white'! When you caught your break with Tommy Boy, the label and HipHop as a whole were still pretty diverse. There was sort of disco-ish party rap like this cut and then straight electro like "Planet Rock" and Jonzun Crew type stuff. Were you interested in both and were people split over rap and electronic influenced music? There weren't enough people into this shit to have a division. Everyone was into everything. Working with a drum machine was easier. At the time, samples and things that could kick an existing loop over and over weren't as prevalent, but you could always find an 808, that's why so many of these records had that 'patented electro sound', everyone was using the same equipment. I tended to like the funkier stuff. But there weren't enough people into this shit to have a division. I mean the Roxy was a huge auditorium, but a lot of times they were only using a third of the floor. Everyone was into everything. John F Kennedy A Memorial Album Dedicated To The 35th President Of the United States (excerpt) (Modern Sound) 1963 I own all these records about Kennedy. I own about 2000 spoken word recordings, I have pretty much every Kennedy thing extant. Though it's one of your least known tracks in HipHop circles, 1986's "The Motorcade Sped On", which cut up samples of the Kennedy assassination, seems to be one of the first attempts to tell a specific story by way of sampling. How did you come to make that after doing such playful stuff with the earlier Tommy Boy "Lessons" records? I was always listening to vaguely arty shit, like Laurie Anderson and shit. Douglas and I had done our first three mixes when he finally decided to go back to work and move out of our apartment. He also didn't want to spend as much time making music anymore; the first record took a weekend, the second record took a month and the third record took like six months. So I was just walking around, thinking about a new record, and I knew I wanted to do something emotional. I wanted to learn how to make records with other people. I booked some studio time and I told the engineer I had the beat from "Honky Tonk Woman" and I wanted to make a record about Kennedy. The New Musical Express put "Motorcade" on a flexi with Sonic Youth and Sly & Robbie. It was enormous in the UK. The American taste moves to the next big thing very quickly. Over in England, they kind of take their time, and things become big there that aren't big here. They were more excited by the ideas. I wanted to make the most emotional record I could. I wanted it to be riveting. I was thinking strictly in terms of sampling spoken word and I wanted to doo-dad it up with as much emotional stuff as I possibly could. There were sirens on there, I had a crying baby in there at one point, and this guy I was hanging out with told me it was too fucking scary. I just wanted to make a spooky, emotional record and I really enjoyed that. At the time, there were a lot more people listening to HipHop who were more aware of the Kennedy assassination. There were people whose time that was. I could make a 9/11 record, but unfortunately my take on 9/11 is so not what the mainstream is, I don't want to get lynched, but that would be a similar event. You can hear in those people's voices [on the record] that their world ended. It was unbelievable. It was me wanting to make a record with a lot of depth - I'm still really happy I did it. It seems like so much of today's sample-based instrumental HipHop - especially people who claim to be inspired by you - lacks the desire to be narrative-driven like this. There's a built-in narrative to "Motorcade", yeah. It's not like I went to a steno record and made a narrative out of it like Kid Koala does. With Shadow or Eric [Koala], there are rises and falls and tension and release, there's a real sensitivity to the material. There's motion to the songs and how they go along, it's not 'Oh, we got a hot beat and we can plunk a lot of shit onto it and yahoo.' Cut Chemist "Lesson 4 (The Radio)" from Unified Rebelution 12-inch (Yellow promo) 1995 Wow, you keep on playing me all this old shit! This isn't that old, but it's someone you've definitely had an impact on. You performed with him. Scratching's real tasty. Much more contemporary-sounding scratching. Ah, it's either Shadow or Chemist. Chemist? Oh this is "Lesson 4". Wow. He fucking hits me right in the center every time; he doesn't overdo it, he's always right on with the funk, and the scratching is amazing. He has a real sense of what he's playing you, in terms of the content. You know a lot of the newer guys? My awareness of much of the stuff that I now know about happened slowly, long after the fact of it actually happening. I'm not terribly proud of being as out-of-touch with things as I was! Meeting some of these guys is really inspiring; after I left them I came here and started working on my mix for Solid Steel. Eventually it became more and more involved because I realised, damn, I want this to be really good. Your Solid Steel mix has got a lot of contemporary rap that people may not be expecting. With the crazy collection you have here in your office, what do you look for when you go shopping nowadays? How did you end up using something like blockbuster St Louis rapper Nelly's "Country Grammar"? Well, quality of the track obviously, if it's exciting and funky, which is why I suffer so strongly with most of the really commercial rap and a lot of the really intellectual rap at the same time. The track doesn't seem to be as important. On the intellectual side, it's like, 'Hey, let's put in a couple of 5/4 pieces to show people we're really hip!' And then the other guys are like, 'Well, Wu-Tang is doing a lot of Gothic sounding shit, why don't we do some Gothic sounding shit too!' When I shop, I go to this place and just grab 100 records and just throw them on the turntable. If the track gets my mind, yeah, that's the first thing. "Mo Money, Mo Problems" by Biggie? That track just grabbed me immediately, and I can only think of two other recent songs that made me say, 'That's fucking great': Q-Tip's first single "Vivrant Thing", and "Hot Spot" by Foxy Brown. [Flips through the crate of records on the ground. Laughs and pulls out the Nelly single] What a good record "Country Grammar" is! I'll play you the mix I did on it. [Cues a remix of "Country Grammar", complete with chanting monks creeping out the left channel] This is pretty unusual, reworking such a high-profile rap tune! At the time [of the Tommy Boy contest], we were very old for the demographic. I was already 30, Douglas was 27, we were white. We were already unusal then. Think about how I feel now! I'll be 50 years old and I'm still doing this, excited about being a HipHop producer! I mean, I joined the American Association of Retired People last year!