Mark Ronson

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0:47Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, Liberty. Savings vary. Underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates excludes Massachusetts. Ruthie's Table 4, in collaboration with me and Em, intelligent style for busy women. If you were looking for Ruthie Rogers at 11.45 p.m. last Friday night, you would have found me in an abandoned office building three stories underground, dancing to Mark Ronson's set with hundreds of other people. Clinging to my friend Josh's hand in the dark stairway, I asked, so is this what they call a rave? It was exhilarating and joyous and definitely a night to remember.

1:27Mark is a musician, a producer, a DJ, and now an author, and quite simply, one of the nicest people I know. We share more in common than you might imagine. We love work as much as fun, strong friendships, and family. His two-year-old daughter is named Ruthie. Mark just published a memoir, Night People, How to Be a DJ in 90s New York City, a moving, highly self-aware account of his childhood and early days as a DJ. It's a love letter to a bygone era when everyone was out in the clubs every night. After my first rave, I plan to do the same. I don't think either of us were out last night, or at least I wasn't, because at 9 o 'clock this morning we're bright-eyed and wide awake, here at my house ready to talk about food, food and music, food and family, food and memories, food and love.

2:21Now that's what I call a rave. That's great. I love that when did the word rave start? rave as opposed to a nightclub what distinguished it was usually it was in a disused or an illegal venue because it was a place for like underground parties to happen so the early raves obviously all the rave culture came out of England and a little bit before my time probably the late 80s and then I was in New York and the early raves or at least New York trying to copy what was going on in London and Manchester. All happened in the early 90s. But it was fueled by this thing of like kids wanted to go out and dance en masse.

3:04Thousand kids take ecstasy, sure, and do all this stuff. And in these places, and they weren't allowed to, so they found disused warehouses in the middle of a field and all this kind of stuff. So as much as I would love to believe that our Friday night was a rave, I would say it was a little, like we call it low-key rave. low-key rave but it was amazing because it was no no no i want a high-key rave no no no no as far as i'm concerned at my age that was a high-key rave and it was so nice to see i was in the middle of playing like whatever dre and snoop or something and i just looked to my right and you're there that was a high high point of my life it's funny what in what you're saying in the intro i think about you and being a chef and running the restaurant and me being a dj like I have a job to do.

3:52I am fully concentrated on what I'm doing, but I do have these like 20 seconds in between. I can like go and you're looking out at this room with all your friends in it and then a lot of strangers, but it's, you know, it's, it's kind of, I imagine a little similar. It is. I think that I go in and, you know, with cooking, you really need to see every, you know, I stand at the pass. We have an open kitchen. I can't imagine being underground and not seeing the reactions of people who are eating, for good or for bad, sometimes you can go to somebody looking, or you can see them sharing, or they'll come up and say, how did you make that?

4:28There's something that you said before that just stuck out. It's like you can just remember the face of that one person. I don't know if it's like this for you, just the one person who's not enjoying it. You could have 150 people enjoying having the best night ever with that one person who's just like putting the food in the napkin or in my case just standing there with their arms crossed, not dancing. and I realized because in the 90s when I came up as a DJ in New York City we hung out a lot with stand-up comedians and this was a time when Dave Chappelle yeah a lot of people on the way up and and I remember speaking to my stand-up comedian friends and realizing how much we had in common because they too would just have like a great night in the club but would only remember just like the one person's screw face they're not and you go to sleep with this person's face like imprinted in your brain it's i don't know if that's like that no i feel that i used to come back and after a night richard would say how was it and i go i think i'm i think maybe i'll give up yeah yeah i just think maybe this job isn't for me and it just felt you know either as you say there's the person who just kind of shook their head or they sent their food back or yeah whatever because and then and then you have the other night where you're just flying you know But I think that people's reactions are really, that kind of immediate reaction is so important.

5:49Yeah.

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6:55So it's not quite fair that you can do so many things well. No, you DJ, you write music, you perform, you produce, you write incredible songs that we all remember and listen to. And now you've written a book, which is a little bit like one more thing that Mark Ronson has done. What made you think you were going to write a book? I don't know. I think quite a lot of my friends from this time were actually dying. I hate to sound like so macabre, but I was thinking about my best friend, this DJ Blue Gem, so I came up with and went to my first raves with and used to do a radio show and all this stuff and all these memories from the 90s which was such a great time in in New York and you had Biggie and Jay-Z and Q-Tip and all these people like these heroes of mine they would be hanging out in the club in the places I DJ'd at and it was before VIP and bottle service where like everybody mingled together the clubs were such a melting pot and i also really wanted to write a story about what it's like to be a gigging dj like on the way up not when you're a superstar and you're like kind of at the top and everyone's handing you everything it's all easy but like doing it some nights playing for empty rooms for 50 bucks and some nights you're playing in the most fun basement ever and what that emotional ride is like and and technically a bit like what it what goes into DJing I it's kind of a lot of reasons when did you find the time to write I I kind of had to I had to it took over my life you know except for the time we took out to really make work on Barbie I took it took me almost two and a half three years to finish this book and I would just write five hours.

8:46I read the Stephen King book on writing and he really tells you like the discipline like lock yourself in a basement for five hours a day and that's what I did. That's a beautiful book and I read it knowing that I was going to meet you but and I thought that it was just so honest and it was took me through the story of of a time and a place and it took me through the story of your life of you know the the emotion and the rigor and the experience and the honesty and and I was wondering whether you might read it read something from the book now I thought of this one thing just now when you were talking about you know in the vinyl era as opposed to now when you're bringing music on a USB stick or a laptop I would spend so much time putting my records together, preparing for the night, because you could only bring a finite number of records with you.

9:46And it was so much fun to think about what kind of night it's going to be, who the crowd's going to be, is it going to be this kind of record? So you almost have this connection with your audience, even if you've imagined them before you get there, because you've bonded. You picture this imaginary dance floor. This is this one passage where I'm sitting on the floor of my apartment on 29th Street, and I'm 21 years old at this point. That's just a short passage, but I thought I'd read it. Album covers provided visual cues that helped me start building up a set. The lipstick red telephone on the cover of Clear's Intimate Connection instantly conjured the sharp electro sounds of the Roland 808 drum machine in the song's production.

10:30That 808 led me to Marvin Gaye's Sexual Healing with its iconic rhythm track, then to Loose Ends Hanging on a String and Chaka Khan's Ain't Nobody. The Khan record wasn't made with a drum machine, but its moody synth lines made it a natural fit. And from Ain't Nobody, a DJ could go anywhere. No dance floor could resist belting out that oh oh oh oh before the chorus if you duck the volume and let them sing it that moment was a perfect pivot to drop anything from soul to soul to souls of mischief sonic fragments an 808 conga or an arpeggiated synth motif hummed constantly in my brain it was like i had a tiny antenna that was always alert for the frequency of music standing in line at the dry cleaner i'd hear Bill Withers' lovely day and immediately think, oh, that would go perfectly with You're Gonna Make Me Love Somebody Else by the Jones Girls, already pre-performing the blend in my brain.

11:33It's hard to stay present when your mind is constantly pairing tempos and keys instead of focusing on the person in front of you. But there was no off switch short of a lobotomy. well we we talked both about our work and and um talked about how you prepare but i do you have a kind of way that you want to eat before you go on stage i have to eat really light because the nerves and the crazy like my stomach even before it doesn't matter if i'm playing to like 300 kids in a basement if i'm playing 10 000 people on a festival stage there's just like yeah i just my stomach goes into doing cartwheels and i remember reading this famous bowie quote or something like he was like i don't trust anyone that doesn't get nervous before they go on stage it might not be the case for anybody but um that quote certainly made me feel better this much closer to bowie yeah um i can there's something about the adrenaline and what's going on in a system as i'm djing i can i mean i don't do this anymore but i could knock back six strings and not feel anything but the minute the music stops i'm suddenly like whoa and i remember i dj'd tom cruise and katie holmes wedding and uh it was going really well it was like a great gig um i was doing all these mixes of like the top gun theme with like these hip-hop breakbeats and tom's like shooting the fingers at me and everyone's out on the dance floor and I was knocking back like drinks totally fine and then as soon as the gig stopped and we got in the car to drive with someone in the Italian countryside I was just like whoa pull over and then I just delivered a pavement pizza to the Italian countryside but there's something about the adrenaline and thing but yeah I have to I have to eat a lot of actors do a performance and then meet you for the theater afterwards right they want to go out right something yeah I know and I talk about it a lot in the book as a DJ you end your set at like three or four in the morning and you've just for four or five hours just been in this room of like pure reverie and like you've been part of the reason for the ringleader people are like and that energy is contagious and then you have the ego stroke of like look what I'm doing all these people and then four o 'clock the lights come on and the room is not packed four o 'clock in the morning there's the last 17 people in there and you're like well wait where's my fun yeah and so back in those days in the 90s I would be leaving the club at four and I'd be maybe calling the coke dealer on the way out like hey where are you man I'm coming you up and now when I come out of the club I'm like online making an appointment for my acupuncturist for the next morning because my back is killing me You mention your back a lot.

14:33So tell me the effect of the back.

14:39It's just 30 years of standing up for five, six hours on end because of the DJ stance, which is the headphones on with the neck slightly crooked to the left or the right when you're doing it. And five years ago, my foot swore up to the size of a basketball. And I went to the doctor, and he looks at me, and he's like, yeah I looked at some of your videos online of you performing on the way here because I just wanted to see if there are any clues and he's like and I noticed that you tap your foot like this through the whole set to the beat I was like yeah everybody does that he goes well you now have this early onset arthritis synovitis a lot of musicians even uh orchestral players like in the philharmonic and everything get it because they're lightly tapping but you do that for 40 years so i i call it dj foot like i just named it from for myself but obviously it's but yeah there's all these back issues i have sort of terrible tinnitus it reminds me sometimes of did you read kitchen confidential anthony boyd it's that's one of my favorite books ever and that thing when he's in the end when he's just listing off all the things that you would know the afflictions of being a chef, the Burns, all the wear and tear and stuff.

15:51And I was like, it's not near that level for a DJ, let's be honest. We don't have scars and stitches everywhere, but it does have its own sort of list of complaints. Let's talk about when you were growing up in North London. What was it like in the house? Because your parents had parties and they had, you described these amazing kind of open house where people came and there was noise as a child. But would you sit down to dinner at night as a family and talk about what you did at school? I remember Friday night dinners at my grandmother's house. Okay, so the Shabbat dinner. The Shabbat dinner.

16:29What was that like? I just remember from an early age being like, Grandma makes great matzo ball soup. That's kind of like just all Jewish kids, right? Did you do that every Friday? Most Fridays. I think most Fridays. A lot of Jewish families always describe it as that was one constant. That you could even go and then go out late, but you had to go. There was no way my dad was getting out of, no matter what was going on, what my parents were doing, it was like he had to be there with his kids. Did your mom go? Yeah, my mom would go too. When they split, and then we moved to New York when I was eight, because my mom married my stepdad, There was still a lot of partying and revelry in the house, but they had another two kids, and there was more structure and dinners.

17:20My mom, she grew up in a household of five children. She was the second oldest, and her mom died when she was 11. So a lot of what would have been taking care of the younger siblings and the cooking and that stuff fell on her. So she would just make, I think, giant batches of macaroni and cheese and whatever like she came up cooking in bulk you know like that was the lesson so with five kids as well it was like it was a lot of there was so many casseroles in the freezer like it was crazy yeah like and as kids we were just like it really was like casserole again like it was it was that so it must have taken quite a lot she had five kids yeah in a house in new york and you were all in school yeah and then she was still they were having this musical party life yeah what was it like for you i think it was a great place to grow up you know my stepdad was a musician he had a recording studio in the home i would use all his equipment some nights i'd wake up in the middle of the night and like john taylor from dran dran and like absolute heroes like hanging out in the thing and they were all partying and my mother was quite strict because she came from england so coming to new york that level of parenting of english parenting is much more intense like our curfews were like three hours earlier than everybody else's but um as long as we did our homework and we did well in school she was definitely like i played in a band she's like you can go out play in a band i wanted to go to shows she wouldn't let me go to shows at first so i got a job writing for the school paper reviewing the shows so then she's like okay what kind of Just concerts, just like wanting to go see whatever bands and indie bands and things that I loved when I was 14 and 15.

19:12So by having a position at the school paper, then she was like, OK, well, if you're writing about it, if it's work, you can go.

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20:06That's why over 200 ,000 happy customers have made the switch. Upgrade your space today. Visit washablesofas.com now and bring home a sofa made for life. That's washablesofas.com. Offers are subject to change, and certain restrictions may apply. Do you remember restaurants? Yes, I remember there were a few restaurants that were really like marked special occasions. Yeah, special occasions. Special occasions. It was like most of the time we're getting home, but there was Gino's on 61st and Lexington, and it's like a very classic thing. It had been around since the 30s, and Frank Sinatra was the only person who was allowed to make a reservation there.

20:49It was like a classic old school Upper East Side. it was really sad when it closed. It closed about 15 years ago. But they did this amazing thing where once a year they would do this thing where they would go back to the prices of when the menu first opened and it would be like$2 for a plate of the veal Milanese and there would be a line around the block on those nights. That was, I remember as a kid, especially you go into a place and there's zebras on the wallpaper and all the waiters are just so Italian and like from the old country. I think that was my favorite place as a kid. And then we take all five of you out?

21:32Would you all? Sometimes. That's a lot. Yeah. I remember we went there one time after Yom Kippur after having fasted all day and my sister Samantha, just as we got to Gina's to break the fast, she just like threw up all over the entire table, just like one of those like really like like just launching vomit it bounces off the table um but they you know they brought us a new tablecloth we were regulars we've talked about the way you eat when you're performing there's also the way you eat when you're producing when you are in it you take a break and say let's we've been working all morning let's go and spend a couple of hours would you like to keep going and have a sandwich at your it's it's all of those things it's all those things because it's like sometimes like it's great like you've you have a great session or maybe you've gone like a whole week you know and then it's like friday night let's go out somewhere lovely like um i've been working with dua libra quite a bit in new york and she loves to go out like she doesn't live in new york so she wants to go to estella and all her like favorite places and she loves to eat yeah she's a good She and Callum met in the River Cafe.

22:46She told me. And it's so nice that they met over food. Yeah. How did you meet your wife, Grace? I met Grace. I saw Grace across the room at a party. I was down in Mexico City to DJI Festival. And I saw her across the room with her shock of red hair. And she looked so chic. she was wearing some like flowy like silk pajama suit or something and I remember looking at her and then intentionally like in this very immature like schoolyard way like not looking because I'm like well I'm not gonna look because I know you know this kind of thing but then inventing this whole thing like oh I'm sure she's seen me looking and I'm really not gonna look and whatever it is and then I when I met her properly we had a brief hello that someone introduced us shook hands and two three years ago later sorry when we finally had our first real date i was like yeah remember that night in mexico city and she just looked at me so blank she's like i didn't know that you were in mexico city that night so like my whole thing i invented she was like but i do remember so we were introduced by my friend leaky lee the singer who i made a lot of music with she was playing matchmaker and i remember one of the first things that she said about grace like she meant as the the highest compliment was like, she says, Grace is just the best.

24:08She's not like all these other girls. She eats everything. That was like the first thing that was just meant like, she's like not fussing, whatever. We had our first date. Our whole courtship was food and dating and restaurants and all of it, you know? And then I remember cooking for her like the second or third time that she came over. Do you remember what you cooked? Yes. I cooked a salmon with a mustard glaze because I'm just like, I'm so useless at improvising. That's good. But I'm very good at following directions to a T. So I mean, I'm not going to be able to make a souffle, but I could do a salmon glaze or something.

24:52And I remember being so terrified of overcooking, to keep taking the salmon out every 20 seconds to poke it. and then she's a great cook but she's much more improv like can just pull a few things from the cupboard, it's like that's the difference between the two of us, she's just so free flowing and wonderful and just in that sort of way and I'm quite Virgo and uptight so I'm not an incredible cook but what I've found in our relationship I have three or four go to dishes that Grace really loves and that's what I do now so there's like a chicken curry. Did you learn to make that in England? I actually learned to make it from a New York Times recipe, you know, just like, and it takes so long to prepare the sauce because I'm making it from scratch and the purine and the apples with the spices, but it's kind of like making it attract.

25:49There's things, there's an order to it and a sequence that you have to follow, but it's so rewarding as well at the end. They say that food relieves hunger, of course. Food is also a way of sharing, and food expresses love, and food is going out to restaurants and having fun. But it is also comfort. So is there a sense that you seek some food for comfort? Yes. My comfort food is not the most original idea in the world, but my comfort food is my brain just goes to pasta always. That's what I dream about when I close my eyes. And also, there's something about it's just so fulfilling. I mean, even just the way that like, I mean, even the physiology of it, right?

26:41It like expands in your stomach. There's something you are full. You are full of, I don't know. Yeah, so that's always my comfort. But that aglio aglio peperoncino is just like one of my favorites. I did make that. I did start to make that. I also wanted like the second or third things I made for Grace when she came over. I think I got the pepper ratio wrong or something. And I just remember like her like steam coming out of her ears and her like nodding trying to be like, she's like, there's a lot of pepper in this one. Now that I came on stage while you were working, maybe you'll come on my stage and come into the river cafe.

27:20Come in the kitchen and we'll do some cooking together. How about that? Is that for real? I would love to. It's for real. I'll come to the raves and you can go to the River Cafe. Yeah, that would be. We'll do this together. Maybe a rave in the River Cafe. How about that? That's the best combination. River rave. Yeah, River rave. Let's do it.

27:44Ruthie's Table 4 is hosted by Ruthie Rogers and produced by Alex Bell and Zad Rogers with Andrew Sang, Bella Cellini and Susanna Hislop. This has been an Atomize production for iHeartMedia.

28:02Hi, it's Ruthie Rogers and I'm so excited to announce that we have a new book. Squeeze Me has 47 delicious lemon recipes from the River Cafe, beautiful art by Ed Boucher and words by Heather Ive. Pre-order now.

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29:18Liberty, Liberty, Liberty. Savings vary. Underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates excludes Massachusetts. This is an iHeart Podcast.