Mark Ronson on His Front Row Seat to 90s Hip-Hop History

0:05This is The Run Through. I'm Chloe Mell, and today we are joined by my colleague, Senior Editor and music editor-in-chief, Corey Seymour. Hi, Corey. Hi, Chloe. Corey, you got a chance to talk to New York's favorite DJ and music producer, Mark Ronson, about his new memoir, Night People, How to Be a DJ in 90s New York City. I love Mark, and I think that he always has such a thoughtful way of thinking about life and music. What was it like chatting with him? We had a really good time. His book is great. I really didn't know that I would love it as much as I ended up loving it. And it kind of turned out that he and I were sort of on opposite sides of the 90s.

0:48We were both night people, but I was in rock and roll clubs and he was in hip hop clubs and dance clubs every now and again. These were your Rolling Stone years. My Rolling Stone years. And he was an intern at Rolling Stone. We were not there at the same time. You were an intern at Rolling Stone. I was. Were you there with Mark or no? I was not. Okay. He's a bit older than me. A lot of ships in the night. But we had a really nice time. He has such a kind of fascinating childhood. His father was in the music industry. His stepfather was in a legendary band from the 70s and 80s called Foreigner.

1:21His mom was sort of this woman about town, and he was best friends with Sean Ono Lennon and spent a lot of time hanging out in the Dakota. And it was sort of like gilded childhood, but also the other side of that was him running free around downtown New York and all these clubs, legal or not legal at the time, and getting into some trouble, but maybe not as much as he should have or could have. but was also, he's quite frank in the book and in our chat about how ambitious he was while also sort of being on this kind of dark side of 90s nightlife. He really, really busted himself to gain these skills as a DJ and just work every room and haul up crates of records and learn what it took to just hold a room and to command a dance floor.

2:13And it's not an easy thing to do. I think we all know Mark later in life as like the sort of like Lady Gaga whisperer or working with Bruno Mars and things. This book is not really about that. It's about him really, really working his butt off to become who he is today. Well, I'm excited. I also read the book and really enjoyed it. My husband listened to it in one day. I recently ran into Mark at a children's birthday party, and his toddler is similar in age to Alice Albert. and he was very proud because his daughter, who is like two years old, started singing every word of the Hanukkah song. And you could see he had real investment in her musical future.

2:56I can't wait to see what happens. It was like now it'll be the third generation of being steeped in music. Yes, exactly. It will be fascinating to witness. Well, Corey, I'm very excited to hear you guys get into it. Two real nighthounds.

3:16Hey, Mark. Welcome. Thanks for being here on The Run-Through. We're very excited to have you here. Thank you. And thank you for writing this book. It's not what I thought it was going to be. I don't know what I thought it was going to be, given book by Mark Ronson. Yeah. But I wanted to ask you first, could you just describe what this book is? What's the general ammo on the book? This book, I call it a mini memoir because it's really just about my teens and early 20s. It's about New York City in the 90s. It's about specifically New York City nightclubs in the 90s. And it's about DJing, but like in a specific way.

3:52I think a lot of DJs have written memoirs. I haven't read many, but something more about the emotional drivers and the kind of like intense highs and like extreme loneliness of DJing as well. As I got deeper into the book, I didn't mean to write such a kind of honest or warts and all book. But I realized that you're writing about night. You have to talk about getting fucked up. and I had to talk about my own compulsions and addictions. So it's kind of all those things, but I don't want to make it sound too dark. I still want to have the energy of a kid in New York City finding his people, finding his way, and hitting some fucking speed bumps along the way, and that's what it was.

4:34For sure, and we're going to get into a fair amount of that. I want to know, for someone who lived largely nocturnally in a very alternative world you were living in, how did you remember or report or recall all of the detail in this book? Because it's not really an atmospheric book. It is a very specific book. You talk about what song you played that went into this song, that went into that song, and then something happened, and then you walked down these stairs. How did all that recall from someone who was altered at an altered state through a lot of this. And it was 30 years ago, a lot of it.

5:16Well, my greatest asset in writing the book was how visceral memories of music were. So there's things I couldn't tell you that happened to me last week, but if I hear Busta Rhymes, put your hands where my eyes can see, I can picture and smell the inside of a club called Rebar on 16th Street. It's just like I remember the way I dropped it the one night that the crowd went crazy. So music is such an amazing memory because there's also music. I can't scientifically prove this, but music memories carry in a different way because the music literally resonates in your bones. Like music actually vibrates through your body as you're experiencing it.

5:54So there was definitely music was a big help. And then I interviewed hundreds of people for this book. You know, it's not an oral history. It's a first person memoir. but as the DJ of course I remember the night when I was in the DJ booth and there was a huge fuss because Biggie came into our club for the first time and it was like a visit from the Pope but you know I was in the corner with this weird angle of only the dance floor I don't remember exactly what happened at the door when he came in he usually came with like 40 people so I had to interview Big Frank who was at the door that night like what was that story again how did Biggie and he's like yeah Biggie came and he stood there and just kept giving me$100 bill after$100 bill as I let all his guys in.

6:38And then he just finally came in and hung out. So all those things that I thought were really fascinating. And the thing about the 90s that I thought might make an interesting book is nobody realizes when you're living in the time that you're in the time. You know, we were always looking to thinking how cool the 80s must have been at the Roxy and Danceteria. but you know a lot of kids were coming out to me just being like gen z kids like yo you were in new york in the 90s and this was even five six years ago before we've we all know there's like a crazy 90s fixation going on and i understand why because it was this era that there's there was no camera phones there's not a lot of documenting of it and all the music being made in new york at that time was kind of like the biggest music at least in hip-hop so you had Jay-Z, Biggie, Little Kim, Tribe, and then you had Missy and Timberland and people from other places that were all in New York making their records, and they would all come to the club.

7:33And there I am with this sort of front row seat to it. So I thought for other reasons like that, it would be fun to get as much of that, to paint it as vividly as I could. And obviously, like you said, my brain is foggy as hell with some of the memories because I was getting fucked up. But luckily there's nights that really stood out and music was this trigger. And you make a really good point with this sort of sensory memory of music being this very particular thing. I want to talk a little bit about your upbringing. You were born in London, yeah? Yeah. Grew up largely in New York from a young age.

8:10Yeah. Your father was in the music industry. Your mother was around the music industry a lot. Your stepfather was a member of the band Foreigner and certainly a big part of the music industry. There's something I read in the book where you talked about the difference between like a groove and pounding techno and kind of obscure disco with a filthy bass. But you were like 12 at the time or something. And I don't know that a lot of like 12 or like 14-year-old kids would really understand the difference between that other than being like, I like this or I don't like this. And is that because you grew up in this music industry family or two families?

8:50Yeah. And was that a part of your life the whole time? And did being a night person come more naturally to you because of that? I think that definitely I know the story you're talking about. I was probably maybe 16 at a rave called NASA. I remember going to this little side room called the Chill Out Room because just, you know, I grew to appreciate techno. It just like wasn't my thing. And in the chill-out room, DJ Dimitri from D-Light was playing. And he would play disco classics. And all these 15-year-old kids, just ecstasy rolling off their faces. And he's playing pretty obscure stuff. And he was playing Funking for Jamaica by Tom Brown, which is a song now I've played a thousand million times in my DJ sets.

9:31But it just had this bass line. And I played in a band. and I played, some of the guys in my band were really excellent musicians and could play that kind of stuff and turned me on to a lot of funk and like jazz and acid jazz and things. So I had like enough of the language and the words to know the difference between these things. But certainly growing up as a very young kid in London with my dad before my parents split, he played only like Sly and the Family Stone and Graham Central Station. So there was this sort of like horns and groove and all that stuff that I was exposed to and really loved from an early age.

10:11And then when my mom married my stepdad, Mick, from Foreigner, then it was a much more like seeing the insides of the recording studios and him coming back at three in the morning and me waking up and him playing me like the latest mixes and showing me the difference between a vocal up mix and a bass up mix and these things. So I think all that from a very early age, I saw that night was this time with all this possibility. Daytime was great, but it was school and whatever else. And then with my parents, they had a pretty volatile marriage. So nighttime for them was like fun and people around and a lot of partying.

10:53And then daytime was this sort of pretty unpleasant place to be in my household. So I think for many reasons. I sort of gravitated to it. But there was a point in the book that I just, the opening paragraph just said, like, I'm a night person just like my parents before me. And I go straight into this story about Robin Williams waking me up when I was a kid. And my editor, I had this fantastic editor, Colin, and then this editor named Hannah Wilentz, who's a brilliant editor from The New Yorker, came and helped me in the last few months finish. She's like, you can't just say, like, I'm a night person.

11:30You have to justify, clarify this thing. Like, why were you a night person? Why were your parents night people? And this was like really towards the end of the book. And the last thing I wanted to do was like go interview my parents again. Like I turned into literally like a 16-year-old. Like, I don't want to clean my room. You know, like I don't want to talk to my mom anymore. I have to talk to her three times a day as it is. But I was so glad I did. And she really, people care so much when you ask them about themselves and their lives. And moms, parents, but especially mothers, get the least gratitude for the most amount of work.

12:04I think dads kind of get a bit of a more free ride. And just to ask her, like, what was it like for you as a girl? Why did you love the night? So, yeah, I found out that my mom loved that because she grew up in a raucous household. And her mom died when she was 11. And there were six kids. And she was, the night was the only time that was quiet. And she could paint her room. And my dad just liked to be out at night because that was music and partying. And he was a rebel. You know, his parents are very straight-laced, very strict, tough love, North London Jews. His father was a hardcore boxer fighting fascists in the streets of East London.

12:41Like, they came from tough childhoods. And night was something that was an escape for them. You went to Collegiate. You grew up on the Upper West Side, yeah? you befriended early on Sean Lennon you ran with a pretty interesting crew how did you meet Sean and was he instrumental in you entering the music world or were you guys just great friends Sean I met at a party my parents were friends with Jan and Jane Wenner started Rolling Stone and I even I was such an obsessive music nerd and would hassle Jan every time he came over the house. And he actually gave me an internship when I was 12, 13, 14.

13:26I'm sorry, I missed you there. I came around two years later, something like that. I was answering the phone and my voice hadn't even broken yet. I'd be like, hi, Rolling Stone. You know, like this massive PBX switchboard routing calls. And Sean and Yoko were very close with them as well. So one time I just met them at this party. I think we were both 12. and I was dressed like I was in Duran Duran in some like pint-sized members only black leather jacket and saw Sean who looks so cool and probably went over and was like, do you like Inexcess? Like whatever the hell. We started talking and it just got on so fast, so quickly about music and started jamming and teaching each other little riffs.

14:08And, you know, a few years later, Sean just became an exponentially more talented musician than I did. But yeah, we really had our formative years, those sort of, you know, listening to Zeppelin and Hendrix and all the cliches. And we never really played in a band together, but Sean and I and our other best friend, Max Leroy, who's no longer with us. We were like this Three Musketeers thing. And Sean, because he was Sean Lennon and he was such like a mountain of charm, even at that age, he sort of had his like dad's sharp wit somehow. at 12 and his mom's cool avant-garde-ness like we we crazy shit happened like we had he was friends with michael jackson and we michael jackson came and had a sleepover one time and then we went to see michael's show and went to an after party at the saint regis where we were throwing soggies which are like giant mounds of wet toilet paper out of his like penthouse suite window and like just smashing into the sidewalk on the street below i mean obviously we made sure nobody was gonna get hurt this is michael's idea yeah michael loved to throw soggy's um keith herring you know was friends with yoko and i remember getting smuggled into a area the club area when we were 12 and just like being like whoa like nightclubs like cool and even the feeling that knowing we weren't supposed to be there made it probably even more exciting other crazy shit happened with sean as well but i did i in the book i i wanted to toe the line between like anecdotes and not being like just piling on stories with famous names in it to like look like they're hooks like if there wasn't something that was sort of a learning moment or something important or pivotal i'd sort of i tried to be sparing because i didn't want just people to be like oh it's just like a name dropping exercise you do a really nice job in this book obviously of celebrating the party, the scene, the cool place to be.

16:12And you're very honest about these other feelings of the night, that maybe you only love the night when there's a lot of people around and that being alone in the night when the party's over and you're by yourself and you're carrying crates of records down some rickety stairs and taking a cab by yourself back home where you're awake by yourself, it can be lonely. And you don't shy away from, I guess, I don't know if you can say the shadow side of the night because there's no shadow. Right. Is that something that came naturally to write about? Or did you struggle to include this kind of 360 version of the night?

16:50I started to think night people. And the book is dedicated to this amazing person and DJ Blue Gems who's no longer with us. And he had a label called Night People because he really was one of those people that came alive at night. the mischievous glint, the leader of the party, the leader of the after-after party, all of it. And I realized that if I was going to get into some of these things and talk about the night and why we go out, I had to talk about the other things. And yes, I was out mostly because I love DJing so much and I love to rock a room and build it to this intensity. And then the lights come on and you've got this sort of conqueror's energy and sometimes half a liter of vodka flowing through your veins and you want to go out to party and you look around and the whole room's empty.

17:38So what do you do? You maybe go to the after party, call a dealer. There were nights sometimes I'd be texting the dealer as I put my last record on. I was really compartmentalized. I could really keep it together for the gig because I always wanted to do the killer job. But then once it was over, I was looking for the party and sometimes you find it and sometimes you just go home alone and you kind of like, you have all this energy and adrenaline and nerves and the whole night is flashing in your head and you're just lying there and there's no way to fall asleep for hours. Your ears are kind of ringing because you've been in a club.

18:14In one chapter, I compare it because we were really close with a lot of the stand-up comics of that time because it was this time in New York in the 90s where Dave Attell and Dave Chappelle and my good friend Jordan Rubin were doing sets at the Cellar and we were all hanging out at each other's gigs. there's very a lot of similarities between djs and comics i mean like we both work clubs we both you know one is called timing one's called rhythm we both call it killing you know i think they're obsessed with the craft usually only hang out with other djs or other comics so there's none of this occurred to me until i read your book and it made so much sense it's like you comics and djs you have the crowd in the palm of your hand and you have to keep it there and you can lose them and And you can get them back.

18:59And yeah, it makes so much sense. Yeah. I talk about this one story in the book where I was outside the cellar and Dave Chappelle comes out. And he's like, hey, like just even, you know, at 22 or however old he was, he just had that like Pied Piper, life of the party energy. He said, I'm going to this club life. Who wants to come? And I, you know, he snuck us into life. And then that's how I ended up bugging Steve Lewis, the manager, to give me a gig that then became the gig that became my sort of, you know, big platform in the late 90s. That was the Studio 54 almost of our era, except instead of like, you know, 60 foot ceilings and Bianca Jagger coming in on a white horse.

19:40This was just like a basement club at, you know, Prince and Chris Rock and Mariah Carey and Jay-Z and everybody was sort of in there.

19:53Time for a break. More from Mark Ronson on his new book, Night People, in just a moment.

20:08Hi, I'm Rebecca Ford, Senior Awards Correspondent at Vanity Fair and co-host of Little Gold Men. Oscar season is upon us. Little Gold Men takes you behind the scenes of the race for the biggest prize in Hollywood. There's a hundred wrestlers in the room, but only one can be Oscar nominated. Whether you're a movie lover or an industry buff, Little Gold Men from Vanity Fair has everything you need to know about this year's Oscar race. Follow and listen to Little Gold Men wherever you get your podcasts.

20:44Do you remember when you first decided that you wanted to be a DJ? what was the first kind of baby step you took toward doing that it was really um i i was always at you know a fan of hip-hop from the periphery so i knew the you know the commercial shit and stuff that was on mtv ll cool jbc boys public enemy and then i discovered stretch armstrong on bobito's radio show in the early 90s it was this amazing underground radio show on columbia and they were the first people to play the earliest demos from Eminem and Biggie and Wu-Tang. They broke everything. And so I started to hear records like Black Moon, who got the props, or Dwyk by Gangstar that you couldn't just go into HMV and find.

21:30You had to sort of dig, and they were only available on 12 inches. So I was sort of going down the rabbit hole of this music. And then I went out one night to the Rave, where I used to go, and went into the chill-out room. And after DJ Dimitri from D-Light played this disco set, this other DJ came on the set, this kid named Ani. And he had just, it was the first time I saw in person someone cutting up two copies, like going back and forth on these records that I was like falling in love with. So like Gangstar and, you know, more obscure records like the XX Posse and whatever and just watching Ani do his thing.

22:10And so at that point, I was like, I mean, I was flying off my face on ecstasy and acid, but I was like, this is just incredible. I watched him all night, and then I just became an incessant nuisance to my mother for six months asking her for turntables or five months or something. And that's how I got my turntables. And your first DJ name? Terrible DJ names I had. But at first I picked DJ Old English because it was the name of a malt liquor that we drank and it was like reference in hip hop. And I thought like, oh, this has been a little bit of this albatross around my neck being English and speaking with this funny accent.

22:49And I'm going to kind of reclaim it. But that just didn't sue me. Then I changed it to Mark the Spark because like a lot of nicknames you get when you're starting out, they're usually hand-me-downs. there was a guy in brand newbie and called mark the spark that my friends all listen to and they just started calling me that then i met the real mark the spark and it was very embarrassing to have his name and then i just changed it to spark ronson briefly you could honestly there were parties that i was doing that the same party week to week you could see my identity crisis in real time just every week there's a different dj name on the dj flyer and then i just settled with mark gronson i'm like it's not it doesn't have like crazy razzle dazzle but it is what it is i'm still jealous to this day like when i became friends with danger mouse like 20 years ago and you know because i we're sort of kindred spirits he was making really interesting music it was even before the gray album and i remember just being like man it's so cool he's like so cool and he has such a cool name and he does all these different projects and they've all got different names that are cool and all sparkly, you know, but I'm just Mark Ronson.

24:04It can sometimes help when you're trying to get a reservation at a restaurant, but you know, it is what it is. As a DJ and you're, you're famous, you're not famous. You're still largely front and center, whether you are physically or sort of like whatever, spiritually, like you're the person leading the party. Did that scare you at a young age is that where you wanted to be did you want to be this sort of the god up there on stage um well when i started especially in the 90s there was no like the only people that were like god-like djs were like armand van helden and like the big room you know junior vasquez and the those like real big name djs that you know on the main floor but in the hip-hop scene stretch armstrong was the legend like i said flex kid capri but most of the rest of us like we were playing in clubs where the dj booth wasn't a point of focus for anyone like people were psyched to see a dj they liked you dropped a great mix heads would swivel to the booth like oh like whatever it was but i didn't mind being the spiritual leader of the party but i did not love being on display when DJing sort of turned to that, when DJing became like, and as I became, I don't just use plain words, became more famous because I put out records that people love.

25:28Like, of course, it's so exciting that people are suddenly coming because they love music that you've made. But I was so awkward and uncomfortable with the attention of people staring at me. the advent of the superstar DJ some of this has maybe existed on a sidetrack to what you're doing in hip hop with like Tiesto or David Guetta or something like that the EDM guys are a little different from what you're doing there's some very funny stuff that you write about in the book where like their booth screams God is a DJ and there are these like superstars at the front your booth as the hip hop DJ says also maybe God is a janitor Yeah, because you're DJing in this glass-walled booth that you're like, I'm sure this was the mop closet.

26:14Because we're at the top of the thing. It's the only thing that really makes sense. But are you comfortable with the advent of the superstar DJ? People like Calvin and Diplo, and they make incredible music. And they are now the headliners of festivals. and because house and techno and EDM has such a bigger, broader audience than any of the music that we were playing. And I always thought it was so cool that Roger Sanchez and Armand Van Helden would come down to our parties to hang out because even I knew they were like, oh, those are the guys that make massive records and play in Ibiza, you know?

26:53And that music wasn't necessarily, for me, although I loved a lot of the French touch and Disco House and the records Armand was making. But I appreciate it, and I appreciated the production of it. It just kind of wasn't my thing. I remember one night going to Armand's loft in Flatiron, and there were these two French guys, Daft Punk, Guy and Tomas, and they were sitting there because they were friends with Armand hanging out, but they were programming their helmets, the gold Daft Punk helmets, and it was hooked up to a keyboard, and I was like, what are you guys doing? And they're like, oh, we have press interviews tomorrow with CNN, so we're pre-programming the answers that will come across our helmets when we do it.

27:36I remember them even coming one night when I was DJing. Daft Punk came when I played at this club called Spa. And I think Mariah Carey blew into the booth because she would always come and request a song. And I think the door slammed. Daft Punk, they're in the corner. But I just, yes, being around those guys was incredibly exciting because it wasn't my music but I knew how big they were and then occasionally they would have me come and open for them like when they would be playing and like their crowd would would go for what I was doing for like an hour but it you know the EDM thing is when it really blew up in the late 2000s or like sort of early 2010s like I certainly reaped some sort of benefit of it at least in this country because it wasn't my music but I I remember when I put out Valerie the first time, and it had been a big hit, you know, with Amy Winehouse.

28:29It was on my album, and it says Mark Ronson featuring Amy Winehouse. And I remember the guy at the American record label saying, it'll never work here because, no, they don't understand that thing of the DJ's name before the artist's name. And it's never going to happen on American radio. And I remember when, like, Calvin just started smashing it. I was like, I have to thank you for paving the way for us to put a DJ's name before the artist. Because in England, that was sort of par for the course. England's got a history of embracing dance, music, and rave. But here it really was an unusual thing.