Gabriel Roth

Jeff “Chairman” Mao

Welcome to the afternoon lecture. Normally, you wouldn’t see me doing the afternoon lecture after doing the noon lecture, but we are just breaking all the rules today. That is just how special today is. And making it even more special is this gentleman here on the couch next to me. He is in charge of a wonderful music label known as Daptone Records. He has flown in today fresh off the plane straight from the airport. Didn’t even go to his room, came straight here to be with you. And please join me in welcoming him, Gabriel Roth.

Gabriel Roth

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Jeff “Chairman” Mao

Good to see you, man. How are you?

Gabriel Roth

I am doing real well, it is good to see everybody.

Jeff “Chairman” Mao

Welcome, yes. We had Mark Ronson here earlier, you know this gentleman?

Gabriel Roth

I do, I know him well. He’s a good guy, and almost everything he was telling you is true.

Jeff “Chairman” Mao

Almost everything. At some point we will get to the point that it’s complete lies and expose that. But anyway, Mark as you have heard, has worked with some of the musicians that Gabe also works with, as well as yourself?

Gabriel Roth

We did a lot of music for Mark, the Amy Winehouse record, we did about six of the songs, we did all the music for him.

Jeff “Chairman” Mao

But, as I said earlier, usually I like to try and introduce our guests with a little piece of music. So Gabe, can you operate this machine over here properly? [Gestures to turntable] Gabe is going to play something from his repertoire at Daptone Records.

(music: Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings feat. Lee Fields – “Stranded in Your Love”)

Jeff “Chairman” Mao

So tell us what was that we just heard.

Gabriel Roth

That was a song called “Stranded.” It is a duet between Lee Fields and Sharon Jones, something I did a few years ago for a record called Naturally, a Sharon Jones album.

Jeff “Chairman” Mao

I guess, explain, with this example in mind, your recording studio, where this was done and how the whole thing is set up. Mark started on it a little bit earlier, him walking through and being in heaven. But maybe you can explain a little bit more definitively exactly what this studio is set up like.

Gabriel Roth

The studio is an old two-family house in Bushwick, Brooklyn, a real nasty neighborhood. But we were able to rent this house out there, and it’s a real beat-up house. On the top floor we have offices and on the ground floor, we have a studio, which we built, just ourselves. It’s not real big but it’s all analog with no computers in there. There are computers upstairs, we’ve got to make some money and sell some records, but downstairs is just tape machines. We have a CD burner in there, but other than that, we don’t have any digital reverbs or anything. It’s all springs and plates and microphones and tape machines, and mostly good musicians is kind of the key.

Jeff “Chairman” Mao

I guess, what was the philosophy of putting things together this way?

Gabriel Roth

I think the advantage I had coming into the whole thing, as far as the music industry, is that I never really wanted to be in the music industry. I never really wanted to be a record producer or a record label owner or even a musician. I didn’t have any lofty aspirations in that way. I wanted to be a math teacher. I played music at college, I was in bands, but I never really considered it as a serious occupation and I just kind of fell into it with Philippe Lehman.

He was this guy, who I knew, who Jeff knows, too. He was a record collector and started putting out compilations and reissues of really rare funk stuff in the ’90s, I guess, the early ’90s. I moved to New York and got really into the records and then he moved to New York from Paris, and he was looking to produce records, and he didn’t know anything about that. Somehow, a mutual friend hooked us up and I knew a little bit about engineering and arranging and stuff like that. I was into the music, so we kind of hit it off and started making records.

So, I kind of started making records just for fun and we did it in basements and wherever we could, and we did it the way we wanted to do it. We really loved all those old funk records and old soul records and stuff, so we did everything really raw and real distorted and we didn’t give a f--- what anybody wanted us to do or what the things sounded like. I had never worked in a professional recording studio at that point. I didn’t really care what anybody thought, and for me, that turned out to be a huge advantage, because I think one of the reasons I’ve been successful is that I’ve done stuff my way and it has been so far outside of what’s going on, as opposed to working in a studio and learning, “This is the way you’re supposed to mic a snare drum; this is the way you supposed to do this; this is the way you do art work and this is the way you sell records.”

We would put out records with made-up names and made-up titles, made-up stories, and people would ask for pictures of the band and we’d say there isn’t one. We didn’t care. We weren’t really planning on, like, “How can we be a legitimate record label?” We were just having fun, and it just kind of kept going very slowly and organically over the years. Desco stopped and Neal Sugarman and I started Daptone. And as that went, building the studio and everything, it was kind of the same approach from the beginning… just concentrating on doing things how we want to do them and they can become the records we want to hear, as opposed to what we thought would sell and what wouldn’t sell. And because of that, I think, we have been real successful.

Jeff “Chairman” Mao

Let’s back up a little bit. I want to get a bit more detail on what you just talked about with Desco and how you got started, because a lot of the same personnel is involved doing a lot of different things. Daptone is the label and the recording studio in Bushwick. Who is on Daptone?

Gabriel Roth

It’s a pretty small family of singers and musicians. Our biggest act is Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings, they do real well. Our last record with them sold about 150,000 copies, which is a lot, considering we are not working with any major label or a major label distribution or promotion or anything. It’s all independent out of this house in Brooklyn. So that’s our biggest act. We also have the Budos Band, which is kind of an instrumental Afro soul psychedelic band, and Naomi Shelton & the Gospel Queens, which is a real kind of soulful gospel act and Charles Bradley, Binky Griptite and a number of different things, one-off 45s, the Menahan Street Band. It is strange, because we have done pretty well, but not a lot people have heard of us. We are a very small independent label, a lot of music we have done has actually gone on to be… in the last couple of years, there is “Roc Boys,” the big Jay-Z song...

Jeff “Chairman” Mao

Jay-Z’s “Roc Boys” sampled one of your records.

Gabriel Roth

There was a Rhymefest one… A lot of hip-hop samples have come from our records and end up on the radio, so it is strange to me to hear this weird kind of underground stuff we are doing in Brooklyn on the radio. And then, of course, what Mark was talking about, the Amy Winehouse and some other pop stuff… people have hired us to do productions for them. It’s strange, because we have a certain amount of clout in this kind of underground scene and a lot of pop producers know who we are. We don’t have any kind of celebrity on that scale in the general public; people don’t know who we are. It’s kind of nice.

Jeff “Chairman” Mao

Let’s go back for a minute and just talk a little bit about how you got involved. You mentioned Desco and Philippe Lehman. Philippe Lehman was a French-born Parisian record collector, super, super, heavy, heavy-duty, soul and funk 45 record collector and DJ.

Gabriel Roth

He is out of his mind… he is completely out of his mind. It was great. He would have these crazy ideas, he would say, “Let’s do a sitar funk album.” And I’d be like, “OK,” and he would say, “We’ll do it this weekend.” At the time, we were renting studio time at this heavy metal rehearsal studio out on Long Island, where they would give us day rates real cheap, and we would go out in three days and do an album. So, we were going out there in the car and I’d say, “Who is the sitar player?” He’d say, “I rented the sitar, it’s in the back seat, you’ve got to figure it out.” I made this record, it’s pretty awful, but it is a record of James Brown and Meters covers, weird things, with me figuring out how to play the sitar. The thing was that he was just crazy enough to try stuff like that, and because of that, I think, he had a big influence on my approach to how you make records, which is “Just do whatever you want to do, and if it sounds good, it’s good, and if it doesn’t, it doesn’t.”

Jeff “Chairman” Mao

So you were playing whatever came up? Bass, guitars…

Gabriel Roth

I used to play drums in high school. I was a drummer for a long time. And luckily, since I met Homer Steinweiss, who has got a great sound on the drums, and a lot of other drummers I work with, they are all much better than I ever was, so I don’t have to do that any more. But then I started playing bass because I couldn’t find a bass player – they all wanted to be guitar players and were all playing a lot and I want to someone just to go dum, dum, which is pretty easy to learn.

Jeff “Chairman” Mao

So those days, what years are we talking about now?

Gabriel Roth

’95, ’96, ’97.

Jeff “Chairman” Mao

Who else was involved, as far as personnel goes, with you and Philippe?

Gabriel Roth

Binky Griptite was one of the first people I hooked up with, who is still with us in the Dap-Kings as a guitar player and MC and singer… an MC/announcer, he is not a rapper. Homer Steinweiss is playing with a different band called the Mighty Imperials and Neil Sugarman at the time had this boogaloo soul group, the Sugarman 3, and I produced about three records for him. He later went on to become my partner now in Daptone Records and he still plays with the Dap-Kings and does a lot of stuff too. Fernando “Boogaloo” Velez, a conga player who has been around 15 years. It has been a real family affair the whole time, which has been real nice. A lot of the same people in other bands in New York, there’s kind of a whole scene. Antibalas, this Afrobeat band; a lot of us play with that band and a lot of people are just going back and forth between different bands. Some started touring more and you have to pick a horse and ride it.

Jeff “Chairman” Mao

I guess, the first time, maybe even before I met you, I remember reading an article you had written in this UK fanzine called Big Daddy, which was hip-hop-related, but also very much in tune with funk and soul resurgence that was happening at the time towards the end of the ’90s. Around the time of “Brainfreeze” by DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist doing their thing and stuff like that. You wrote an article entitled “Shitty is Pretty, Anatomy of a Heavy Funk 45,” and I wonder if you could explain a little bit about that philosophy and your mindset when you were doing those recordings and writing that article?

Gabriel Roth

Man, I didn’t know what I was talking about when I wrote that, I didn’t know what I was doing. It was the same thing I was talking about, this philosophy that if you wanted something to sound rough and raw, and like the live recordings and the kind of recordings I was enjoying at the time, that had to be your approach to making it, you had to do it live. A lot of people are really into vintage equipment, for example, valve gear, ribbon microphones, all kind of things like that. And as we have got more successful and I have got more money in the studio and stuff, we’ve got some stuff like that. But the key was, especially the first records I was making, there was a lot of microphones from RadioShack – it’s like a cheap electronics store. You buy a microphone for like $5 or $10 to plug in your Walkman. I was using those kind of microphones. I recorded a record with Bernard Purdie playing drums with RadioShack mics hanging over his head. And just the kind of approach, being able to use whatever you have and just rely on the performance of the musicians and your ears… to use whatever you had to get what you want, and that kind of guerrilla approach to recording – really raw stuff. The funny thing is that that article kind of haunts me. Every week I get emails from people who’ve read that article and say, “Wow, that’s great, I’m going to do it.” And I keep thinking, “Man, don’t listen to me, there’s some crazy stuff in there.”

Jeff “Chairman” Mao

I’m going to quote from the article a few excerpts here. This is from “Shitty is Pretty, Anatomy of a Heavy Funk 45” by Gabriel Roth: “Parts of an arrangement must be brutally repetitive. If you can’t get into the idea of playing one chord for a whole song, put down this magazine and go find yourself a nice Beatles songbook… It’s best to get time-machine players, genuine old-school players who think they are still in 1971, or those who are so into rough shit that they can willfully deny the influence of the last 30 years on their own playing.” And you also have some “never” rules, never do this, never do that. “With respect to rhythm, never have two hands playing on a hi-hat, unless it is 1970 and you’re in Ghana. Never slap your thumb on a bass. A mean drum break will make even white people bite their bottom lips and bop their heads up and down like abandoned monkeys.” Which is actually true. “Be also advised not to overuse breaks, because breaks are like antibiotics, if we prescribe them to everybody in a few years we will all be immune to them.” I think actually there is a lot of wisdom in some of these things. But I am curious to know, the philosophy back then for you, obviously, coming in was really do-it-yourself, real punk rock in a way.

Gabriel Roth

I would not believe everything you read in a magazine, but it was real punk rock. Exactly, it was punk rock and it’s still punk rock in a strange way. Even our record label, the business side of it, the independent side of it… But a big part arrangement-wise was just talking about the discipline that musicians don’t seem to have any more. A lot of musicians will complain about producers using drum machines and samples and loops, and I think part of the reason why they started doing that is because drummers can’t go more than four bars without playing a drum fill any more. Everybody was trying to play, everybody wanted to be a virtuoso all the time, and they didn’t understand. Even horn players don’t quite understand that much any more how to be part of a section. When I listen to all my favorite records, be it James Brown or Cuban orchestras from the ’40s or some reggae stuff… whatever it is, one of the things that I really love in musicians is the ability to kind of make one sound and to be able to understand that each person playing one note is so significant. It’s more important to play one note just right than to play a whole bunch of notes. I think that’s one reason why jazz has gone to complete shit and musicians are out of work, and people are using samples is because people don’t know how to play with the same kind of groove anymore. So, the biggest resource we have at Daptone is having access to these musicians that are all of the same philosophy. You can’t bring ego, you can’t be part of a band if you’re playing like that. Because of that, we’re able to make records that other people are sampling, because the musicians on the record are playing with that kind of discipline, that kind of togetherness, that kind of awareness of the whole part of the arrangement.

Jeff “Chairman” Mao

Can you give an example? Play something that sort of exemplifies what you are talking about?

Gabriel Roth

Yeah, I can give an example. This is a test pressing of this new Sharon Jones album we are working on, and there is a song on here called “Give It Back” and the trumpet player, Dave Guy, wrote the song. The main part he wrote was this guitar hook that went [sings guitar hook] kind of real picky – a Smokey Robinson guitar hook – and it was kind of the main part of the song. We had these two kind of complicated guitar parts going through the whole song, and when we went into the studio to do it, I started working on an arrangement for it. We put a little bit of strings on it, and we put great background vocals on it, vibes and a couple of things… just sparse, just to be sparse with the arrangement.

Anyway, while I was mixing it – somebody earlier asked a question about having too much stuff and getting stuff too thick – I was mixing it and I had all these faders up, and I could get the rhythm section sounding really good. There was all this arrangement stuff, and it was just too much, it was just way too much going on. At some point we figured out, if I just turned the guitars off, it sounded better. So I just went back in and put another guitar on it, took out the guitars and just put [sings guitar] and it kind of holds the arrangement together. You can hear in the background the other guitars bleeding through. It’s funny to play this example because what you’re listening to is the part that you don’t hear. It’s the idea of playing nothing that kind of hooks it up a little bit.

(music: Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings – “Give it Back”)

Jeff “Chairman” Mao

So wait, what was the name of that?

Gabriel Roth

I think it is called “Give it Back,” it’s on the new Sharon Jones record. But the point is that one guitar is just playing [sings simple line] and if you listen to a lot of records you have, the thing is, you will find a record, one of your favorite records or what you are influenced by… there is a record that has an amazing guitar part on it, and there is a record that has a great vocal on it, and there is a record that has an amazing drum pattern and a great bassline. But it’s not the same record, they’re all different records. The reason why there is room for someone to play a great bassline is because some guitar player is playing [sings simple guitar part]. And some other record, the reason why there’s room for a great guitar part is because the bass player was playing [sings simple bassline]. That’s it. You need that kind of openness. And that is one of the things… I don’t want to say progress, but as far as the development of my arrangements and stuff, I’ve been having more discipline and learning more about space.

The phrase is, I guess, to kill your babies: get your favorite idea, the thing you like most and just throw it in the garbage. Working on a record, I find that I do a lot of that. I might stay up all night for five nights on something and I’ll work on it and get this arrangement, this amazing horn arrangement that’s like a Bach chorale, like the most genius thing and I’m patting myself on the back all the way to work and some horn player says, “Hey, what if we just go harum, blat.” And it takes a lot, it is hard to take yourself far enough out of it to go, “You know what? You’re right.” And there was some of that, there is the idea that music isn’t about necessarily being a genius. That’s another reason why people started sampling and using computers to make music, because computers are stupid, and if people had more discipline and were prepared to play something stupid and just use a lot of balls and a lot of feeling… People play too much, there is way too much playing.

Jeff “Chairman” Mao

So, you are never tempted to take a bass solo and just like slap the shit out of it?

Gabriel Roth

Oh man, no. I’m not tempted to do that. I think that is the biggest thing with our approach to music, just that the musicians and the arrangement is paramount. And if that’s right, then the rest is going to fall together. For me, personally, I think the biggest challenge, as far as being a producer and trying to make a record, is trying to be inside of it and outside of it at the same time. Inside of it, in a way that I need to have my ear on the arrangement when it’s going down. I need to hear if somebody is out of tune, I need to hear if one violin is louder than some other violin and if the harmony is off balance. I need to hear all the details of it. Engineering-wise, I do all the engineering and stuff on here, and I have to hear what is going on with every detail, and if the mic pre-amp is distorting… whatever, those kind of things.

But, at the same time, you need to be far enough outside of it, so you can listen to it, not like a producer or a musician, or even a music writer. You need to listen to it like somebody who works at a coffee shop and it’s their favorite record going home. You need to be able to listen to it like a human being, just listen to how it makes you feel, and that’s really hard a lot of times with music because you get so inside of it and you are so inside of your ideas about what’s going to work and what’s not going to work. It’s hard to let go of things sometimes. Especially engineering-wise –there are all those magazines telling you what equipment is good and who used what equipment, and how you’re supposed to use it and how amazing it’s going to sound, and how they made this hit record or that hit record. Man, if you listen to that stuff, you get really confused and get so far inside of the process that you’re not able to hear what you are doing.

I do a lot of blind listening in the studio, meaning I will have two or three mics and plug them in, but I won’t know which one is plugged in where. So, I go back into the control room and I may have some $3,000 RCA ribbon microphone from the ’50s on the horns, but I also might have a RadioShack mic or an SM-57 or a condenser, and some other things, and it might be a $10 mic or a $1,000 mic. But not knowing the difference makes you listen to it differently, really differently. And if you know which mic is on which channel, you have these assumptions. You start listening to all the things you read in the magazine, “Man, listen, this one is warm. That one’s got a little more punch to it, doesn’t it?” Or, “Oh yeah, just a bit more clarity on the high-end,” and it’s all bullshit. If you don’t know which mic is which, you’re not going to talk that way because you don’t want to accidentally say the wrong thing about the wrong mic.

Jeff “Chairman” Mao

Mic might get mad at you.

Gabriel Roth

Sometimes you’ll find that that fancy old mic can sound great, but that $5 mic can sound better. So I’m always hesitant, especially when people ask, “What kind of tape machine are you using?” Or, “What kind of gear are you using?”, because I think it’s very distracting. There weren’t a lot of people asking, you know, what type of paintbrush is Picasso using? Picasso is Picasso because he’s Picasso. Not that I’m Picasso, but the musicians are playing the music. It’s not the engineer, it’s not the equipment that is doing it, it’s not the arranger. You can do certain things to make it sound good but at the end of it, it is more about getting out of the way.

This new Sharon Jones record we did on an eight-track machine, which I’ve found is a big advantage. A lot of people now, there is a very strange progress in recording technology, especially since digital technology came along, but even before that, where things became about isolation and options. How many options can you have? How many tracks can you have? How isolated are they? Because later in the mix you can do different things, you can do overdubs, you can do whatever you want, and I think that’s a useful tool for some people. All of it is just a tool, whatever helps you do it, but I think in the process of that there is something misguided. In the old days, when people made records there was a certain craftsmanship to it, a certain amount of commitment on the part of the musicians and the arrangers and the engineers.

On this record, we did all of the orchestra on one track in one day for the whole album. The way we did it was I spent weeks working on the arrangements, getting the arrangements just right. I went over to one of the violinists and made sure everything looked right on the page first, and made sure it was musically what we wanted. Then before we even went to the studio, I was already cutting parts out. “This is going to be too busy, we don’t need this part.” And a lot of the times it was the best part of the string arrangement, but maybe that’s right where Sharon was singing some amazing part, I didn’t want to take away from what she was doing. So we got to the studio, it’s a small studio. The live room is about the size of that part of the room over there. It’s pretty small, but I set up four violins and two cellos and a timpani, and I put a mic on the violins and a mic on the timpani. In the isolation room I put glockenspiel and timpani and a mic there and I ran them all through a balance mixer to one track. So, as the arrangement was going down, we had a copy of the score on the mixing board, and as they were rehearsing the arrangement we would work out, “OK, at the bridge we have got to turn up the timpani a little bit and we’ve got to turn it down on the verse. We want to turn up the glockenspiel.”

All these decisions, once it goes down – balancing them out too, moving the microphone around, telling the cellists they’ve got to dig into a certain part, making all the decisions, listening while you do it. It takes a kind of craftsmanship and commitment. You have to know what you’re doing and you have to listen to it and know right then, “This is what I want the record to sound like.” And then it hits the tape and that’s it. When I went to mix the record it’s orchestra track eight. That is it. And the thing about that is that a lot of people think that is intimidating, or even kind of impressive in a way, because right now people aren’t doing that that much. If people are recording an orchestra, it is recorded piece by piece on a lot of different tracks and it’s reassembled later. But the thing is, when I’m mixing them together and deciding on what’s happening in the arrangements, those decisions are going to have to be made anyway. My point is, I don’t think I’m going to be any smarter when I mix the record than when I track the record. I don’t think it’s like I’m going to track the record and then later on in the mix, I’m going to say, “Oh, the magic key was to do…,” you know?

I make mistakes and sometimes the trumpet is too loud and you don’t hear the congas or something on the record. But that’s OK. It shouldn’t be perfect. It’s a record. Part of the live feeling you hear on old records are the imbalances and imperfections and the spontaneity of it. You hear old records, and there is a really loud tambourine, and you don’t hear the vocal and on the next song you hear a really loud guitar and the drums are low. Things are in different places and they’re weird, and nowadays records all sound exactly the same. It is always drums and bass and vocals right down the middle and they’re always really loud, and everything else is sprinkled tastefully across the horizon, so you can hear every little piece of everything and that is a mix. Once that is done and the kick drum hits zero dB, that is a mix.

I just think there is a lot more freedom. You can do anything you want to a record. You can put the whole band on the left and a tambourine on the right side. There’s no reason why you can’t do that. It sounds crazy, but if you listen to it and it feels good, then there’s no reason not to do it. The only reason not to do that is if you’re trying to get signed by Sony. If you’re trying to get a major record deal, and you want to talk to A&R people and you are going to deal with a bunch of sycophants that are looking to try and chase the next formulaic pop radio hit so that you can have the next superstar pop hit, then don’t listen to anything I’m talking about, because I don’t know anything about that. The only way I’m going to get on there is because they’re going to sample what we did that’s all screwed up sounding and they’re going to put the bass drum back in the middle. It’s a strange situation.

The other thing about it, having eight tracks – and what some people consider a limitation about it – the other thing I think is that it enhances the recording process for the musicians. If you think about being a musician in a studio and, say, you’re doing a saxophone solo and you play it live with the band and it feels pretty good, but you’re not sure and you go back in the control room and you say, “I think I could do it better.” If you’ve got a computer, you could sit there for a few hours, play six or seven solos, there is no pressure. You don’t know what’s going to be on the record. They might take a note from this or a note from that, they’ll figure it out later. If you’re out of tune, they will fix it. If you’re out of time, they’ll move it over. They will take the best one, if the first is the best one, then it’s the first one… when you’re in the studio with me, if you play a saxophone solo and you are going to tape, you come back in the control room and say, “Oh man, I don’t really like that solo, I feel I could do better,” I say, “Well, if you feel you can do better, then do better because I’ll record over the last one. It’s gone.” And that may seem like a limitation, and technology is there so that you don’t have to do that, but if you think about being a musician, when you go in there and play the next solo, what happens? Your spine is tingling. You’re playing what is going to be on the record. You’re recording over something and doing something permanent. It really puts a musician in the sense of now, in the sense of performance, and that’s the liveness you hear on records.

It’s not even necessarily people being in the same room, it’s about people playing with commitment, with balls, saying that, “This is the part and I’m playing it right now.” That’s not to say that everything is completely live and there is no control + Z undo button. We do splices – we splice together different takes. I do it with a razor blade… if we have to, we will splice something in – but it takes a lot more effort and craftsmanship to do that with tape. It puts a lot more pressure on you to know what you’re doing. It puts pressure on musicians and singers to know what they’re doing. Everybody’s got to do it right. It’s strange because I think, talking to people especially about this record but the last few records we’ve done, you know, I had a 16-track machine for a minute. I went from a four-track machine to an eight-track machine to 16-track machine, and then everyone wanted to lend me 24-track machines, and I got rid of it and went back to the eight-track machine. Nobody could understand what I was doing. But really, being in the studio with an eight-track machine is amazing, it is a different process.

Jeff “Chairman” Mao

Obviously, you stick to your philosophy of how you want to do things and trying to maintain some sense of spontaneity and the music being alive. But how conscious are you of being thought of as trapped in a style that seems to be undeniably retro?

Gabriel Roth

I am not really conscious of it at all. I don’t feel trapped. We make any type of record we want to. If I want to make a country record with a disco beat, then that’s what I’ll do. We recently put out an a cappella gospel record, which very few people bought. But we didn’t really think people would buy it; we just liked it, so we put it out. We put ourselves in a position because we’re completely independent, we don’t owe anybody money, we’re not under contract to anybody, there is nobody that can pull the plug on us or tell us what to do. We do whatever we want to do. We’re not really trapped by genre. The reason why we make records sound like that is because those are the records we dig. Like I said, I have never had ambitions about the music industry, especially about pop music or something. I never listen to the radio, I still don’t listen to the radio. I don’t know what is going on with that stuff. And I don’t have any problem with that, I’m not one of these people who has some kind of an agenda, like old is better and analog is better and digital is bad. I don’t care, man. It is music.

Music is supposed to make you feel good, and that’s got to be the end of it. If it doesn’t make you feel good, it’s wrong, and if it does, then it’s right and that’s it. Different people like different music and that’s how it should be. As far as being trapped in a genre, we make the records exactly how we want to make them, and we’re not trapped at all. I think it is kind of the opposite. If you think about how much music there has been, if you are coming down from outer space and you just looked at recorded music, you’re talking about a hundred years of recorded music. And not just one hundred years, but internationally, there is music from all over the world. Beyond a hundred years, you have Beethoven and sheet music going back hundreds of years, so there is all this music to be influenced by and to play. You could be playing South African music. There is a million types of music, a million genres and, to me what’s trapped is to listen to the five songs that are on rotation on whatever the pop radio station is, and to try to do something that people who like that are going to like. That is trapped, man. Trapped is when you don’t sell 500,000 records and you lost money. That’s a trap, man. I am the furthest thing from being trapped. I do whatever I want to do and I can sell 500 records or two records and I’m not going out of business and nobody is going to fire me. I don’t think we’re trapped.

Jeff “Chairman” Mao

I guess talk a little bit about running the label on your own terms, and how it has been kind of fortuitous in a way. We were just talking at lunch about the record industry vanishing and going down the toilet, but that has been an advantage for you in some respects, doing things the way you want to do them.

Gabriel Roth

I think it is an advantage for us in a lot of respects. Obviously, the internet is a big thing that lets people have a lot more choice in what they want to listen to. I think major labels complain a lot about all the technology in the last few years wiping them out, and they talk about piracy and people copying CDs and downloads. I don’t think that’s what hurt them. I think the thing that really hurt them is that, all of a sudden, if you are in the middle of Idaho or Mongolia, if you have internet access, you can listen to any type of music you want, where it used to be that you had to listen to what was on the radio. You had to listen to whatever your local Wal-Mart or whatever the shop was…

That is what I think is what is killing the major labels; they can’t compete with that kind of choice or that kind of consumer. They developed this model more and more that was based on these huge-selling records, and they can’t make money off a record that sells 1,000 copies. And where it used to be maybe a hundred people would buy a hundred different records… let me not make a really confusing example here, I don’t want to make it a math test – it used to be that a lot of people would buy the same kind of music, and now people can buy whatever they want, whether it’s old music, new music or music from anywhere in the world or any genre. So, that helped us a lot. People are always talking about the sky is falling in the music industry, but I think it’s a wonderful time and we’ve had a lot of prosperity – even with the economy and stuff we do really well.

And I think it’s a great time for artists and for musicians. Musicians never made money off record sales anyway. Anyone who is a musician and thinks they can to make money out of royalties, it has never happened. Unless you are the Rolling Stones, it really doesn’t happen. The way you make money is from publishing, from playing live shows, from selling T-shirts and key chains – this is how you make money. From having a song in a bank commercial, you can make money like that. You’re not going to make money from some record company giving you a royalty check. You may get an advance but you’ll probably blow it anyway.

When they talk about CD sales falling, musicians are not really getting hit by that as much as major record companies. Major record companies are falling to pieces now, they’re scrambling and eating their own tails and they keep trying to think of new ways to sell music and new ways to market music. But what they don’t do is just try to make good records. They’re so distracted by what’s going to work and what’s going to sell a million copies, and, “What if we make a free download with a can of Pepsi?” And, “What if we make a video and how much of her tits can we show in the video?” They concentrate on anything other than, “Hey, what would be a cool record to make?”

Once in a while, there is a weird record like that Buena Vista Social Club record or the Norah Jones record, it wasn’t supposed to sell and accidentally people hear it and buy it. Then the whole record industry scratches their head for a while. All of a sudden, they try to find somebody that sounds like Norah Jones or something. It is really bizarre. It is the same thing with the Amy Winehouse record, it is real weird, man. I give kudos to Mark [Ronson] because he is very different from me, and I think we work very well together because he has his head – he knows about the pop world and he is a lot deeper into the industry side of it than I am. It was real easy to come into our strange world and hear what was cool about what we were doing and kind of incorporate that into a pop thing.

On the Winehouse record, he got our band and put her on it and then mixed it, used some mixer over here, some guy mixed it and made it sound like stuff on the radio. Really bright and lots of bottom end and really compressed and all kinds of shit that I don’t really dig. But again, the records I make are never going to be up on the No 1 spot on the radio. Anyway, after the Amy Winehouse record, which is a little bit weird, it was a bit strange for a record that was that pop to have those kinds of raw sounds on it. After that, all of a sudden, there was a lot of people contacting me… a lot of English singers, actually, young English girls and stuff contacting producers and stuff… “Oh, we want you to work on this record.” And it was just very strange.

Nobody is ever able to learn from that stuff that the reason why these things are successful is because they’re good. It’s not a formula. It’s not because you put the bass drum on a certain way and you put the vocal on a certain way, and this is what makes a good record. A good record is just because it feels good and it’s always like that. There is always some record that you don’t want to like but you kind of like anyway. Everybody has these guilty pleasure records, and it is evidence. There’s things about certain records, “Oh man, I don’t like anything about that genre,” but there is one song or hook that is always in your head. That is it, it’s a good hook. That’s the reason – there is no other reason for it. I think if people could get back towards that, there would be a lot better records being made.

Jeff “Chairman” Mao

I have heard rumors that various people have approached you guys. I don’t know if any of them are true.

Gabriel Roth

None of it’s true.

Jeff “Chairman” Mao

Rod Stewart?

Gabriel Roth

That’s kind of true. [Laughter] That record came out, and we weren’t on it. They asked us to do some music with him, and we tried doing some things and it didn’t really work out.

Jeff “Chairman” Mao

Rod Stewart came to Brooklyn?

Gabriel Roth

No, but I was called into a meeting with Clive Davis. He is like the epitome of big-shot record executives. He shits hits. I am sitting across the desk from him and we’re trying to have a conversation, and it’s like we are speaking two different languages. I have no idea what he’s talking about and he has no idea what I’m talking about. Eventually, he gets me to produce this record and I said, “Man, you know what? No.” He was going to give me a lot of money, but I didn’t want to try and figure out how to please Clive Davis. I didn’t want to be sitting in the studio doing things over and over and waiting for him to say that it sounded like a pop hit. So, I told him, “Here is what I do, this is how I make records. If you want me to do arrangements for you, or if you want musicians, or if you want the studio, if you want me to engineer stuff, whatever you want me to do, I would love to work with you on it, but I’m not in charge of making that record.” He ended up hiring another producer to come and work with me on it, so I said, “Get somebody else to be the producer.” It didn’t actually end up working out. A lot of things don’t work out.

Jeff “Chairman” Mao

You have the memories and the story, which is a pretty good story.

Gabriel Roth

I’ll always have the memory.

Jeff “Chairman” Mao

You mentioned not making money off of royalties, just being able to be savvy enough to sell your shirts on tour and stuff like that. Touring is a huge part of what you guys do. I wonder if you might like to speak on that a bit.

Gabriel Roth

Actually, let me amend something about that, about royalties. I make money on royalties. But the reason I make money on royalties is because Daptone is me and Neil, and we have got Nydia who works for us, who also DJs with Jeff. Everybody knows each other, it’s a tight family. There’s like four of us, and if you have four people in a building selling records, you can make money off royalties. If you think about it, if Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings had a deal with Universal or something like that and we put out a big record, man, think how many people have got to eat off that record. How many do you have to sell before you start making money? A lot of records. We sell a few thousand records and we’re making money. So, I don’t want to say you can’t make money off royalties. I will just say, you can’t make money off royalties if you have a record deal with a major label.

As far as touring, we do really well touring. We have been touring a lot and it has always been by far the best promotion we have ever had. Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings are a really great live act, and a lot of the acts on our label are really good live acts, and just being on the road and playing shows and having people tell their friends is the best promotion we can have. Another advantage that we have is that, because we have built very slowly, we would go to towns and play for 30 people, and then we would come back and play to 50 people, and we would come back and play to a hundred. Now there’s towns all over the world where we play to 1,000 or 2,000 people, and because it was so slow and gradual, all the people who are there are there because their friends told them about the show last time they went, or they heard the record themselves, or somebody played them the record. They’re there because of the music directly, or somebody they trust directly.

If you compare that to having some overnight success, where you have a radio hit or your song’s in a movie, or you get caught snorting cocaine off a hooker’s ass or whatever it is, whatever these big celebrity ways are that make you famous, and you have a big record – and I am not saying they don’t cash out, because they do cash out – but the problem with that is where are those people two years later? They’re gone. You don’t hear about them any more. People don’t have careers like that any more. We have a lot of people that really love our label and the band, and we have a different kind of relationship with them, because they trust us and they have grown with us and they know the music. When you get people into your music that way, in that kind of grassroots way, you have fans for life, and you have loyal fans and you don’t have to spend the same kind of promotional money. You don’t have to go through the same kind of antics, jump through hoops, make million-dollar videos. Not that we don’t do promotion – especially for the Sharon Jones record, which is bigger, and we have started to spend some money on stuff – but for the most part, it’s all very organic word-of-mouth sort of stuff.

Jeff “Chairman” Mao

Can you tell us stories from the road? Some things that you experienced? Because I know, like you were saying, it built up over time, so there must’ve been some times when things weren’t so rosy at the beginning.

Gabriel Roth

The first time I ever came to the UK, actually it was ’98 or ’99 or something, and we did a tour. Man, we didn’t have hotels or anything, man. Every night at the club and after the gig everyone is talking to girls, and it was mostly because they really wanted to find a place to sleep. It gives a whole different meaning to the phrase “I slept with this girl last night,” like, “Really?” “Yeah, she had a beautiful bed.” In Ascot we played a club and ended up staying in the backstage. The guy didn’t want us to steal the liquor so he locked us is in the back. You don’t want to get too deep into road stories, because it gets real weird real quick. But we have traveled a lot. We’ve been to Australia about three times and we’ve been over here a bunch of times, in Europe a bunch of times and we tour a lot in the States. We paid a lot of dues, and we have come up very slowly but it’s been rewarding. We have a really good relationship with our audience and our fans and people who buy the records and come to the shows because of that.

Jeff “Chairman” Mao

We haven’t heard anything in a minute, do you want to share something else with us musically?

Gabriel Roth

Let me share something with you musically here. That Sharon Jones record, I was saying, we took a long time to record. There was a lot of arrangements and a lot to work on, but after that, I worked on that record for months. Mark and I were both working on a record at the same time and comparing notes as we went. It was just taking months and months, especially because we were out of town touring a lot. But, a couple of weekends ago, we did the new Budos Band record and we did it in two days, the whole album. We did the whole thing live in two days and mixed it in a few more days and it was really easy. So, I am going to play something off their new record. I’ve just got to figure out how to work this little thing. I am not great with this kind of technology.

(music: The Budos Band – “Black Venom”)

Gabriel Roth

That record, we did it all in a day. And just to get all those weird psychedelic sounds and stuff, that is all tape delay and I didn’t use an Echoplex or anything like that. We did that record on the 16-track machine, and I had a bunch of extra tracks that way, and I used those tracks to make tape delays. You listen off the repro head, so you have it just timed between the chord head and the delay head. You send out an auxiliary back to the tape machine and that tape track. If you are on a longer delay, you go to another tape track and another tape track. Sometimes you can have two or three. You can set the delay, and if you use a separate tape machine with a pitch, you can do whatever you want with the delay… then you can bring it back to the board and feed it back into itself with the auxiliary again and make whatever kind of freaked-out sounds you want. So, that’s all tape delay and reverb. I do a lot of that in the studio, too, weird stuff with a tape machine. It’s kinda fun. We’ve gotten some weird strange psychedelic sounds and stuff. Mark is talking about the weird synthesizers and stuff, I want to show you another song. This is an instrumental that didn’t make the new Sharon record. We recorded 20-something songs and put about ten of them on there. It is kind of a weird chase kind of thing, but if I can find my way to the middle, there is a cool tape effect.

(music: The Dap-Kings – “Thunderclap”)

Gabriel Roth

That weird “Booo.” It’s just a vibraphone, but when you record it, you get the pitch and you start it slow and you speed it up. So, anyway, it is a lot of fun, those tape-machine tricks and stuff. There is another one, is it interesting? I’ll play one more weird tape machine thing and then we will leave it alone. I dig it, man. You guys are stuck. [Laughter] I was listening to these whole Sly Stone records, these Sly Stone psychedelic records where he has two drum sets. I thought it was two drum sets and I listened closely one day and I thought, “Man, that second drummer is just a little bit off the beat, what is he playing?” And, all of a sudden, it dawned on me, it wasn’t two drummers, it was a delay. So I did the same thing on this one track, I thought it was freaky. Homer was playing the drums, and I put him on one side and I put on an eighth-note delay on the other side.

(music: Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings – “Money” / applause)

Gabriel Roth

I don’t know. I thought it was freaky.

Jeff “Chairman” Mao

I have also been meaning to ask you, so in addition to you guys doing your thing at Daptone, some of your colleagues do a label called Truth & Soul as well, and I wonder if you can speak a little bit about the whole scene in New York, and everybody doing stuff that has some kindred spirit to it.

Gabriel Roth

It is definitely like a family affair. Basically, Philippe Lehman and I had Desco Records, and we kind of parted ways in 2000. We started our own labels, I started Daptone with Neal Sugarman and he started Soul Fire with Leon Michels, or El Michels, who was actually playing saxophone in the Dap-Kings at the time. He started working with him a lot, doing arrangements, and Homer also is playing over there a lot. Then he left, he went to the Dominican Republic to be a full-time cave diver – it’s true – so Leon kind of took over, him and Jeff Silverman. They got a label Truth & Soul, and it’s cool, it’s definitely a family thing. It’s not competitive. And now Tommy has got Dunham Records, too, which is an imprint on Daptone. Everybody is working on that stuff, so it is a family of like-minded people out there that came out of the same school. A lot of it came out of those early Desco years, when nobody cared about anything. We were just wild. So, there is a lot of people making cool music and, like I mentioned before, the whole Antibalas crowd and all those guys… And there is a lot of Afro beat music and soul music and people influenced by… people who want to make real music with real musicians.

Jeff “Chairman” Mao

I remember seeing a YouTube clip of you and Philippe after a Sharon Jones show, I think here in Portsmouth or something like that, and you guys just lamenting how everyone was so into it out here, but nobody cared back home.

Gabriel Roth

Man, it was kind of strange, because in 1999 or so, when we came here we were selling out shows and it was strange because it was kind of the deep funk scene here. It’s always strange coming from America to England and understanding genres. I had no idea what anybody was talking about, they are like, that’s northern and this is sweet and that’s modern soul. I just thought northern soul was like Detroit and Philadelphia, as opposed to Memphis. I had no idea what everybody was talking about, but there was a lot of people coming to our shows so we were really happy. It was strange, because everywhere else in the world we very slowly built up, and now, almost everywhere we go we can get a lot of people coming to see us. We are selling a lot of records. But England kind of stayed almost the same, relatively – we have not grown that much in England, which is kind of surprising for us, because at the beginning it was kind of our best market. And I wouldn’t say it’s our worst market, but we are always surprised the records aren’t doing better.

Jeff “Chairman” Mao

Everybody here is doing their thing, and a lot of folks obviously can’t devote full-time attention to the music. They might do as much as they can, but they might have day jobs. Can you talk a little bit about time management? I know you have a young family like myself, and we were talking about this in terms of time management and what you can do and how it affects your creativity.

Gabriel Roth

You have things together more than me, maybe you should talk about it.

Jeff “Chairman” Mao

No, you’re the guy.

Gabriel Roth

It’s pretty hard, it’s the hardest thing I do, trying to balance time with my family and work. And it’s the same thing. Earlier, I didn’t have to balance family, because I didn’t have family, but I had to balance making money and paying rent. Especially, in New York it is pretty hardcore with doing stuff that you like doing. That’s hard. I wish I had better advice to people. I didn’t do it the right way, I just didn’t sleep and ran up all my credit cards. And I’m sure that’s not the way you’re supposed to do it. Really, my whole career was in a way sponsored by Visa and MasterCard. [Laughter] I should really thank them in a way. At one point, by the time Desco was folding I was maybe $40,000 deep in debt, personal debt and credit debt. Not good debt, not business loans. I had nothing to show for it, and I was sleeping at the time on my sister’s couch.

I made her a deal – she told me if I could afford to buy her a couch, I could sleep on it. She thought I would be there for like a week, and I was there for a year. I was sleeping on couches and during the day I was working crappy temp jobs. The temp agencies in New York, I would just do that and they would send me down to Wall Street and they would say, “Do you know how to use Excel and PowerPoint?” And I would say, “Yeah, sure, send me in there,” because nobody trusts the temp with anything anyway. That’s good advice – if you want to temp, you are definitely qualified. The worst part was, right when I was in my darkest hour, I was completely broke and everything was going to crap and my label had fallen apart, and I was temping and I hated it. I was trying to do music at night and I wasn’t sleeping. Everything was terrible. The temp agency, out of all the places, they sent me to Sony distribution to be a temp. All the other assignments before then had all been on Wall Street, it had always been money-management stuff. They sent me to Sony distribution, and it was just kind of like the most ironic, terrible, hellish place you could be.

Coming out of basically an independent label, I was trying to do everything myself and do it my way, and everything crashed down on me, and it kind of failed. I was sitting inside Sony distribution, and they were trying to tell me, “Here is what you’ve got to do today. You have got to work on this spreadsheet to figure out how many crappy records we can shit out there.” They were just terrible, terrible records, and the worst part was the people there, the people at Sony distribution, didn’t like the records. They would have these meetings and sit around at these meetings talking for an hour or two about the new video for – I won’t say the name of any bands because I don’t want to get anybody in shit – but they would talk about this new band. “Here is their new video. What are we going to do? How about the video budget? Let’s put $1 million into this and $1 million into that. OK, we are going to ship out 300,000 or 900,000.” And this is before anybody heard the record. They’re talking about shipping out this many records; this is how it was working. This is in the beginning of the decade or the last decade, I don’t know, maybe around 2000. It was terrible. And then the meeting would break out and everybody gets into circles and talks about how terrible the record was and none of them liked it. It was really sad.

Anyway, just being that deep in the belly of the beast gave me an even darker perspective on it. I’ve always been a kind of bitter dick in that way, but being that deep in it just made me… I was sickened by the whole thing. I definitely came out swinging, and I was not going to jump through any hoops at any marketing meetings or stuff like that. I’ve definitely tempered my attitude a little bit as we have gone forward.

The hard part now is that I have a legitimate business and we have a record label and a band that is grossing serious money, and I have a lot of people making a living off it. We have full-time employees, we have a band full of people, people with kids who are depending on it to make a living. So, when somebody comes to me with some marketing idea or some TV commercial or something, unfortunately, that’s where I do feel a little bit trapped. I don’t have the freedom to say to Chase Bank, “Go fuck yourself, man. We’re not doing your commercial, I don’t like your bank.” Now, I have to say, well, if we do that commercial, I’m going to feed somebody’s little kids. So, that’s hard. Even though it is a different struggle now, it is very similar to when you are getting started and you’re trying to balance a day job and the music. There are always compromises. Compromise isn’t necessarily a bad thing. There are definitely bad ones. I made a couple. The other side of that, the Chase commercials, I’m going to bring that up again, I actually learned a lot. I have been hired a number of times to do replays. I’ve done replays for rappers, done replays for commercials, I’ve done replays for movies.

Jeff “Chairman” Mao

As a hired gun?

Gabriel Roth

As a producer. I have done them as a musician. People come to me and say, “We want to put this song in a movie,” but you guys probably know that to license a song for a sync or to put it on TV, there are two sides. There is the publishing side and the master side, and you have got to go to the writer for the publishing side, and you got to go to whoever owns the master for the master side. If you have a Stevie Wonder song, you have to get the publishing from Stevie Wonder, and you have to get the master from Motown, who is owned by whoever, who’s owned by Coca-Cola or something. So, what people do is replays, because for the 30-second Chase commercial nobody is going to know the original.

There are some bad ones, I don’t know if it happens here as much as in the States, but in movies and TV shows, they do it. Also rappers, sometimes somebody won’t clear the sample, so instead of paying all the money, they try to recreate it. So, we got hired to do a bunch of those. I could play for you guys if you want to hear some of those. The thing I really, really liked about it was that it was like going to school for me. As a band, I always thought we should do covers. In the old days, bands always did covers of whatever the hit was on the radio. “Tighten Up” is on the radio and every band in the nation was playing it.

It’s a different thing now. All of a sudden, in the ’70s, every artist had to be a songwriter and everybody had to do their own songs, and it became real cheesy to do covers. It was like, you’re a bar band or something if you do covers. But the thing about doing it is that you learn a lot from doing it, especially in the studio, trying to recreate the sounds. We had to do Motown songs and blues songs and we did a Fela song and a Gladys Knight song recently for Ice Cube or Dr Dre or somebody, but he didn’t use it. I don’t know, weird things. But you end up doing these songs and you’re listening to it in a different way in the studio. You’re saying, “Wow, listen to how much reverb is on the strings,” or, “Listen to how quiet the drums are,” or, “Listen to how bright the guitar is.” You listen to it differently when you’re in the studio, and you realize some record you always loved is not put together the way you thought it was put together. It’s put together real differently.

Jeff “Chairman” Mao

Can you just give a quick example of something.

Gabriel Roth

I’ll give you guys a couple. Here is one we did for Chase Bank. I’ll play this if I can figure it out. Is it playing? There you go.

(music: The Dap-Kings – “Uptight”)

Gabriel Roth

Speaking about making replays for Hank Shocklee. Anyway, so we did a bunch of them for him. It was hard because he came and, ahead of time he was like, “OK, I want you guys to do four songs for me.” I thought we could probably do that in a day and then it was like, “OK, I want this one to soundlike Chess Records in 1950. This one’s Nigeria in ’73…” I’m like, “Jesus!” It’s not like we could just leave the stuff set up. Everything was just completely different sounds and different ways to get them and stuff.

Jeff “Chairman” Mao

Before we get to questions, I want to ask one last thing of you. You said that you had always wanted to be a math teacher. And it’s a legitimate question. I have read of you speaking and you’re very humble about your own musicianship, and you had to think of things in terms of mathematics, in order to be actually able to play how you wanted to play. Will you elaborate on that? Because we have musicians here but we have people who are also doing it themselves and I wonder if you can sort of elaborate on that?

Gabriel Roth

I can definitely elaborate on that. I know some gifted musicians and some people just seem to sort of channel music from the sky, and it just pours out of their heart and there is just melody and passion pouring out of them. That is not me, man. [Laughter] I do not have that going on. One thing Mark said, and people always say it sounds like I’m being humble and getting from being busted in an interview, but it’s true, the biggest resource I have ever had has been a family of amazing musicians. And I think, if I can take credit for anything, it is for the ability to help them get together and get along and get out of their way. As far as math goes, yes, I am definitely mathematic, formulaic, systematic. That’s why I really enjoyed those replays, because I take things apart piece by piece.

It’s what I was talking about before, being able to really get outside of something and get far inside of it. Allow yourself to get outside of something and say, “Man, I love that Fela tune or whatever it is, it just feels good, I’m just going to listen to it,” to be able to get that far outside of it is important. But it is also important to get really far inside of it and say, “Why does the hi-hat sound like that?” Be willing to turn knobs all the way the wrong direction from the way you were taught that they should never be turned, and find those sounds and hear those sounds and put them together. And it has to do with arranging and engineering and everything.

It’s like with Sharon Jones, one of the reasons why her and I work together real well, and we’ve been working together for many years, is because she is completely the opposite. We have this kind of Apollonian/Dionysian balance, where she is just crazy, passionate, singing from her gut, won’t do what you tell her, won’t do it the same way twice, won’t do two takes twice. And when you see her live, if she has a bad night, she’ll sit there brooding and she’ll hardly sing, and when she has a good night, she will sing her heart out and blow the roof off the place and people are going to leave there sweating and crying and bleeding. Because she is that crazy and passionate, we make a good team, because I am the opposite. I sit there in the cut playing the bass and I’ll be thinking in terms of, “OK, if we’re going to hit a change coming up, what are the segues, what are the systematic things I need to do to make this change happen? Who in the band needs to know what? What is going wrong? Who was out of tune, who was out of time? Who should play more, who should play less, who should be turned up, who should be turned down?”, all these types of details… I think, in that way, having a mathematical, analytical mind has helped me. But it has only worked because I surround myself with people who are incredible musicians and passionate people and soulful people.

Jeff “Chairman” Mao

Has anybody got any questions for Gabe?

Audience member

So, my question is, if you feel like you know a bunch of artists and music, or maybe even your own music that you think should be out there in an independent way, what it is the first step?

Gabriel Roth

The first step is the hardest step. I definitely don’t have any magic formula to it and I also have not had any huge commercial success, like a lot of people have, who are probably speaking to you guys. But for me, personally, what has worked really well is focusing on the music and having a direct relationship with the people. It is more important to go to a bar and play for seven people and blow their minds and have them have an incredible experience than to do some mediocre shit for 10,000 people. In the long run, it is those seven people and their friends. That is the connection that is important.

For us, when we were on the road, people said, “How did you get so many people to come to your shows?” I wasn’t concentrating on promoting the shows, I was concentrating on doing a better show. “What can we do tonight that will be better than last night? What can we do on stage that would be the best thing?” When you talk about getting artists out there, talent is the first step. The first step is finding that sound, and I think, as far as what I did – and it may be different to some of you – it’s really defining success and defining your goals in a realistic and concrete way, so that you can do them day by day. If you come into this and say, “I want to be the biggest producer, I want to have a huge pop record,” you are going to be like a million other people who miss. But if you come into it saying, “You know what? I want to sell 1,000 records and pay my rent,” or, “I want to be able to go on tour and play shows every night and make a living doing that,” then you have a more modest, realistic goal. Those are the stepping stones to a real career in music. Those are the stepping stones to really build a foundation. Get people around you that you have faith in what they do and you like what they do, and work with them. I think it is more about baby steps, as far as I’m concerned.

People send me demos and it is unbelievable. I get them in the mail from people who are doing country music or hip-hop stuff that I have nothing to do with. If they had spent five minutes look on the internet, they would know that’s not what I do, and they wouldn’t send it to me. But they send me these unbelievable press kits, much nicer than I have ever sent out, with photos and DVDs and CDs and it must cost them at least $5, $7 to make that. If they sent it to me, they must be sending them to everybody. So, you figure for these guys, this is somebody that’s independent and looking to start a career, and they just spent $5,000 or something sending promos to people. Don’t do that! If you have $5,000, keep it and pay your rent. Buy yourself a guitar or something.

One of the biggest problems with the music industry is that there are a lot of people with stars in their eyes, and then there is a whole industry of people that take advantage of that. The reason why record deals are so shitty is not because musicians are stupid, it’s because they all think they’re about to be Michael Jackson. If you’re shooting that high, and you’re looking for that kind of success, that kind of celebrity, that kind of fame and fortune, it’s like playing the lottery. You’re better off, instead of putting all of your money into the lottery, or if you are going to take a gamble, then play blackjack or something you get some odds on. Do something that’s a little more realistic. I’m not saying don’t take risks or don’t spend money, but try thinking in the short term, step by step. Trying to connect people with music is the most important thing, and those are the things that are going to grow in a big way. Maybe some major-label guy with a bunch of money will come and like what you’re doing and be impressed, and maybe they won’t. But I think chasing that stuff is the biggest mistake that people make when they get started. Really chasing after big deals and things like that, either you don’t get them, or you get them and you get kind of screwed because you are so anxious to sign something.

Audience member

I just want to know how you met Lee Fields and Sharon Jones, and how you built a relationship through the years, because it has been quite a long relationship.

Gabriel Roth

It has been a great relationship. Lee Fields, by the way, if anybody doesn’t know who he is, I think he is the greatest singer who ever lived, an unbelievable singer. Anyway, the way I met Lee Fields was, Philippe Lehman we were talking about, my crazy partner who would do anything, called him. We were in the studio and we recorded this track and thought it was an amazing track and we should have a singer for it. Philippe said, “Man, we should get Lee Fields to sing this.” I said, “You’re crazy,” because Lee Fields did all these funk 45s in the ’70s and stuff, and I thought he’s an unbelievable singer. But it didn’t even occur to me that people like that still existed. Philippe said, “Yeah, I’ll look.” And this is before the internet, I’m dating myself. But he just called up BMI or some publishing rights organization and said, “Do you have Lee Fields’ number?” And they said yes. He called him and he was in Plainsfield, New Jersey.

Two days later, we are in the studio with him. I was 19-years old or something, and I just had no idea what was going on. It was wild. And then a saxophone player on that same session who I used to work with a lot, I wanted to put background singers on this track from Lee Fields and he said, “My girlfriend can come down and sing backup.” I said, “OK, but we need two more girls,” and he said, “OK, I’ll bring two other girls.” He shows up the next day with Sharon Jones and there are no other girls. I said, “Man, I thought you were bringing two others?” And she said, “I’ll do all three parts, I’ll save you money. Why pay them when you can pay me?” And right from the beginning she was crazy, she is nuts, and she did the background vocals. Then we had this other track and we had this comedian friend of Philippe’s, who wanted to do this whole big weird kind of talk-rap spoken word thing about how he got out of prison and stuff. Sharon sang the backing vocal on it, it is called “Switchblade,” and she was singing this real nice chorus in the background and we said, “OK, this is what we’re going to do for the lead,” and she just started talking shit off the top of her head and I hit record. It was the funniest thing ever, and that was the first song I recorded with her, and it was basically her talking shit all about, “I got a switchblade and I’m going to cut ya, and I’m going to split ya where the good Lord slit ya.” It just went on and on and on and we were dying in the control room, and after that we have been working together ever since.

Audience member

One of the things you mentioned is that you went through a rough patch somewhere after your first label folded. What made you bounce back and why did you decide to do the same thing again?

Gabriel Roth

It was hard. Again, even after the first time, like I said, I didn’t intend to be in the record industry and, all of a sudden, I had a record label and that kind of fell apart. Not because the business fell apart, the business was doing well. But I had problems with Philippe, and we couldn’t work together any more and it ended up dissolving. The reason I kept going is because at that point we had some momentum musically. The band at the time was the Soul Providers, backing up Lee Fields and Sharon Jones and stuff. We wanted to keep going. We got an offer to do a residency in Barcelona with Sharon, and I wanted to go, so I said, “Let’s record a record so we can go.” I recorded a record in a friends basement and that is our first album with Sharon, it’s called Dap Dippin’. We recorded it in a friend’s basement real quick, and we didn’t really give a lot of thought to it. I just came up with the name of the label, “How about Daptone?” because we were the Dap-Kings and we made a fake label and whatever. Then I talked to another company, and this other company was interested and they wanted to do an imprint deal with me and they said, “You can make whatever records you want.” I said, “Great, I don’t want to deal with the business side of it. You put the records out.”

We worked it out and haggled, and at the end of it I had all these terms that I wanted and they were going to give me 40 grand or something like that to make a bunch of records and stuff. I said OK, we shook hands on it, the lawyers all signed off on the deal, I signed the deal, and they said, “The check is in the mail,” and I said “OK,” and I am waiting and I just kept waiting. And I eventually said, “I’m just going to borrow some more money to make some records because the check is in the mail, right?” You guys know about this industry… Anyway, long story short, the check wasn’t in the mail, the company went bankrupt. It was one of about five major blows that I have had in the music industry, where I had something going with a bigger company and there was some check that either didn’t show up or somebody ripped me off.

Jeff “Chairman” Mao

You guys got robbed, too, right? Your studio got robbed?

Gabriel Roth

The studio got robbed last year. That wasn’t so bad.

Audience member

He asked my exact question, so I quickly thought of a new one for you. With new artists, especially when you go and meet more successful people or people that might give you work, there is always the feeling that if you say no to Clive Davis, or whoever it is, you are never going to recover from that and you get the reputation of being difficult, and you are not going to work in this town again. First, is that even remotely true? And second, how do you kind of balance doing what you want to do and what you believe in and what you just have to do because you have to make adjustments when working with other people?

Gabriel Roth

There is always adjustments. I have had to work with somebody else, when somebody comes in to the studio… I’ll tell you a weird one I did. There’s a singer called Michael Bublé, I did a couple songs on his record and the producer was Bob Rock, who produced Metallica. So this is about the weirdest phone call I could get. For months my manager kept saying, “They want to talk to you about the Bublé record.” I was like, “Are you kidding me? This is a joke, it has nothing to do with me.” Finally, he hands him to me and I talk to Bob Rock on the phone and then it was kind of what you are talking about. I didn’t want to be difficult, but I was very upfront with him and told him exactly what I do and how I do it. I told him three or four times…

I said, “You gotta understand, if you want to make a record with me we are live to tape machine, the drummer doesn’t have perfect tempo, and there is not going to be a click track, it is going to be raw.” And he said, “That’s what I want.” I said, “OK, if that’s what you want, then come on down.” When I am working with someone like that I’m very happy to give them what they want, if it’s within the realm of what I am doing. The reason for that is that almost all the records I make, I make them exactly how I want to make them and I don’t have to answer to anybody. So when I have somebody come in there like that, it is really easy to me. It is actually enjoyable for me to step out of the driver’s seat and say, “OK, what do you want? Do you want it to sound more like this or like that? I can do that.”

Working with Mark Ronson, I really like working with him and it is easy to work with him because he knows what he wants and he knows what we do. We come to the studio, like the Amy Winehouse record, he played demos of her playing acoustic guitar and singing the song, and we put an arrangement together and he would have some ideas together, and be like, “OK, why don’t we do it in this way or that way?” And I understood the references and he was talking about, Phil Spector, or whatever. It was fun doing it that way.

I guess, like I said, the unique position I have been in is that I have never relied on people like that to make my career because I never wanted to be a record mogul or a record producer. And not having that aspiration gave me an unbelievable sense of freedom. If I wanted to be a major record producer, and that was all I wanted to do as a little kid, then when Clive Davis said anything I would have jumped at whatever he wanted me to do, or anyone else for that matter. I think it would have put me at a disadvantage. And the reason why, personally, I have been successful is because I have been concentrating on what I like, and if someone likes what I like, they come to me. Not the other way around. I don’t really have to please outside producers and outside artists in that way. I’m having a meeting in a couple of days with a producer here who is working with some young English singer, and they want to do this gospel record and they want it to sound like this Aretha Franklin kind of Muscle Shoals, Atlantic Records sound.

I had the same thing, had a conversation with them and said, “Are you sure this is what you want?” If you come to me and say you’re trying to make a pop record or something, I’m just going to tell you I don’t know how to do it. I realize that might not answer your question, but the point is, I guess, what is it you are trying to do? If you’re trying to work within the industry then, yes, you are going to have to kiss some ass, and you are going to have to make some more compromises and you might have to change the shape of yourself a little bit to fit inside certain places. If you work for yourself and you’re outside the industry, you may not have to do that.

Audience member

I have a little technical question. Could you walk us through a drum recording session?

Gabriel Roth

Yes. The first thing I’m going to tell you is the most important and is the one that nobody is going to pay attention to. You need a great drummer. Not a good drummer, a great drummer. And when I say a great drummer, I don’t mean somebody that has chops and has a good sense of time. I mean somebody that, when they hit the drum there is a tone that makes you feel good. A thump when they hit the snare drum. Certain drummers get work because they have a tone on the drum set, they have a feel, and if you have a good feel and a good tone that is 90% of it. So, that is the first thing. The second thing is the drum set. You want the drum set to sound good. So, you stand in the room and you tune the snare drum, and you take a pillow out of the bass drum and then put it back in and tape up the tom and you put it in the other room, then try it a different way, all the stuff you normally do with a drum sounds. Experiment. You try anything until it sounds good. And it has to sound good in the room before you get a microphone.

And the other thing, with a microphone, it depends on what kind of microphone use, but for the most part, microphones on a drum set is all about placement. There is no secret placement. When Ronson was in and we were doing the Amy Winehouse record, I had this old Shure 556, it’s an old Shure mic like an Elvis mic, and I had this one I used to love. It got stolen in the robbery. But I had this one I used to love, and when I say this one, I mean this one mic because I bought four of five other ones at different times and none of the other ones sounded good. People will tell you this is a good mic and this is a bad mic but they all sound different. There is no such thing as a brand sounding a certain way. I had that mic and I put it on the ground maybe a foot or two up between the bass drum and the snare drum, pointing kind of up underneath the snare, and I got a great sound that way. I think I ran it through a compressor and I did a lot of heavy EQing. In the room where I record drums, I tend to have to roll out a lot of low-mid frequencies. I almost always use one mic. Once in a while, I’ll use two mics if something has a lot of tom-tom or cymbal. And maybe I have a mic in one position that sounds great but I’m not hearing one thing and maybe you’ll add a second mic. But 90% of the time I use one microphone. Nowadays, as you guys know, a lot of people use 10, 15 mics on a drum set. The top of the hi-hat, the bottom of the hi- hat, the stool. They might have everything in the room, overheads and underheads, and at the end they try and mix it together to sound like a drum set. My take on that is to try and let the drummer sound like a drum set and just record it.

I find, though, that, if I move a microphone one inch up or down or to the left or to the right, it sounds completely different. If I’m not getting enough bass drum, I can move the microphone down an inch and I’ll get a lot more bass drum. If I’m getting too much rack tom, maybe I can move it further, sometimes I move it closer. It sounds strange, but sometimes if you are closer to something that has a lot of low-end resonance, you will lose it just because of the phase of the resonance. Another thing I often do with drums, the high frequencies, 12 to 15k, I just cut it off. I go through a low-pass filter and just take it out, and I’ll find something just underneath there at 8 or 10k and push it really hard. Since that is where you get all that open, perfect, Phil Collins drum sound at the top of the cymbals, which is something that you hear when you like the drums. When you think about it, these songs on the radio we hear that use samples, the drums they sample are always the weirdest, rawest drum sound. They are all one mic on the drums. Nobody is sampling drum sounds with a bunch of mics. So, the kind of music that I like, raw soulful music, always has that kind of drum sound. We get some different sounds, but for the most part one mic and a lot of EQing on the tape.

The other thing is hitting the tape real hard. Here is another trick for those of you recording drums to tape machines. Tape distortion is really different on different frequencies. Low frequencies, like a bass guitar or a kick drum, distort tape in this real fuzzy way and they do it real soon, because it’s a higher-energy wave. High frequencies get a nice crunchiness that, but if you have a mic on the drums and you try and hit the tape machine with it, you will find that the lower end will distort the tape. The kick drum will distort the tape before you get anything nice, before you get that nice compression and before your cymbals and your hi-hat and snare drum get that crunchy tight compression that sounds nice off the tape. So what I do is I roll the bass out going to tape, not all of it. But I will get 100 Hz or something, and dip it way down so the sound I record is pretty thin. I hit the tape harder and harder until the bottom end swells back up and the top end is crunchy and it all kind of re-equalises. And if it doesn’t on the playback, I turn it back up. Whenever I am recording, especially drum sounds, but most sounds, I’m listening to the actual playback of the tape machine, which is delayed and I’m really careful about how hard I am hitting the tape. I don’t really have any more good drum tips. A good drummer is the best one.

Jeff “Chairman” Mao

Alright, this concludes the talk. Please join me in thanking Gabriel Roth.

[applause]