Steinski

Jeff “Chairman” Mao

This gentleman had a very interesting, lengthy, unique journey to get here today. Most of it within the last 20 hours so he’s a little concerned, you know, for some reason, that some of you wouldn’t be familiar with his music. So we’d like to start just by playing a piece, and it goes something like this.

(music: Double Dee & Steinski – “Lesson 1”)

Steinski

And a friend of ours, who produced radio commercials for CBS, came in one day with a copy of Billboard magazine, threw it on the table and said, “Listen, Tommy Boy is doing a contest to remix that record and you guys really should enter.” We looked at it and they had a record called “Play That Beat Mr. DJ” by MC Globe and Wiz Kid, which I already had a copy of. They wanted you to remix it in five minutes using any elements you wanted and we decided, “Yeah, sure, why don’t we do that?”

We went into the studio on a Saturday morning. Douglas picked me up with six crates of records and he had some records in the trunk of the car. We went into the studio and finished on Sunday night. It’s the fastest we ever did anything. We sent in the tape and I kept on doing what I was doing working as a copywriter and copy supervisor in a big advertising agency. One day I came out of a meeting, went in my office and my secretary came in saying, “Hey, you won that contest! Tommy Boy called.” I said, “Really?” She said, “Yeah, the guy himself – Tommy of Tommy Boy!” I said, “No, kiddin’, that’s great!” So I called him back and he said, “Yeah, you guys won. Who are you? What kind of mastermixer has a secretary?” At the time – I mean, I’m old now, we were old then considering that our competition was 70 other entries, which were all done by 18 and 20 year-olds – we came in and I was over 30, Douglas was probably 30 at that point. We went to meet them. It was very complimentary. They had a number of people there who wanted to meet us because we had done this nice tape. We won… we split $100, we each got a T-shirt, we got the entire Tommy Boy catalog which was 15 to 20 records including Afrika Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock.” They asked us for a couple of copies of the tape on reel-to-reel because part of the contest was, they were going to send the mix out to a number of urban radio stations, who had promised to play it at least once, as the winner of the contest. And lo and behold, to ours and everyone else’s great amazement, within a week it was a top ten request item on every station in the US that was playing it. Two weeks after that people were standing on the corner selling aircheck cassettes of it for $20 and in London you could buy an aircheck cassette of it for £60.

That amazed no one more than us. Because we didn’t really see ourselves as glamorous recording artists. We didn’t have any ambitions, we were just two guys who liked to hang around and we made a record and that was that. So we made another and that was based on James Brown, thinking, “Let’s do a record of all these great James Brown cuts.” And the same thing happened, except there wasn’t a contest this time. We just became a request item and, you know, there we were again. So at that point Tommy Boy was involved with a book publisher that was going to do a book about hip-hop. They came to us with a number of records and asked if we could do another mix based on these records. They said, “Don’t worry about the copyrights or anything, ha ha ha.” [laughs] It wasn’t the kind of thing anybody was worrying about at that time. And we made the record that Jeff [the interviewer] just played for you, “The History of Hip-Hop.” The same thing happened again.

At that time it was wonderful. We were living in an apartment in Brooklyn, we had our own little 8-track studio. And by the way, that record you just heard was tape and records on an 8-track tape. I mean, I use ProTools now and I’m dynamite at it, but that was Douglas with a razor blade and eight tracks. In fact, it is all six tracks except one point where he uses the last pair of tracks. So... that’s some hot-shit work there. Just representing my friend Douglas here. What happened after that was... I had become a freelancer, quit my job. Douglas had quit his job and didn’t like being broke as much as I did, so he went back to work. I then made another record with a more emotional/sociological bent to it called “The Motorcade Sped On,” which was about John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Most of you, I’m sure, have never heard of him or the assassination but a president of the United States got assassinated, it was all over the media. When I made that record, around 15 years ago, there were a lot more people listening to hip-hop who remembered the thing happening. And to take the media elements of this assassination and to set it to music really affected people. So that got stapled to the cover of the NME in England along with a few other items and all of a sudden I was an item in England. I could go on forever. [smiles]

Jeff “Chairman” Mao

Before we get onto that... I think, as far as the “Lessons” go, we heard “Lesson 3” just now and we’ll play some of the other stuff as well. But I guess maybe the obvious first question is, had you ever heard anything like what you had done before? What was the template that inspired you to do that? It’s pretty unique, as far as hip-hop goes. Obviously you had two turntables and a mixer but you didn’t really have anything [at the time] that had so many different elements at once.

Steinski

Douglas and I were obviously hanging around down at the Roxy a lot and we both had backgrounds in doing commercials. So we were very concerned with a number of things. It had to move quick enough to be interesting, which is why there’s almost nothing in there longer than four bars, maybe eight bars. You had to be able to hear everything, it had to sound like a finished product. Again, at this point this was all Douglas’s doing. I had nothing to do with the technical quality other than to sit there and say, [in a comical voice] “Hey, this is not loud enough.” That was my entire contribution. That and pick the cuts we were using. What we both shared, also, was a history of listening to New York radio from the time when we were very small. And since I was older than Douglas, I was listening to stuff when Douglas was not. And the first thing that I heard, which was – believe it or not – a monster hit on radio in the United States, I first heard in a Chinese restaurant when I was five on a juke box. And that’s this.

(music: Buchanan and Goodman – “The Flying Saucer”)

And that is the work of two guys named Buchanan and Goodman, who had a very big hit in the United States with that. Nobody had heard anything faintly like that before. It’s absolutely surreal. I heard it when I was a kid and Douglas heard it. They made something like 50 other records. Every time something happened, they would do another record like this where they had some crazy theme – a courtroom scene, a reporter and they’d cut in all these songs.

They were known as “Flying Saucer” records, break-in records, cut-in records. And they managed, because several of them were challenged in court – early foreshadowings of death and... They got around it by calling them parodies. So that became the standard by which you could do that. Now, I doubt it would hold up – to be able to use, without paying copyright, a piece of someone else’s song. And I think that’s also where this great myth of, “Oh, you know, if you just use two bars you’re allowed...?” And it’s like, [waves finger] “Uh uh.” So they got away with it, nobody else did.

Jeff “Chairman” Mao

And they did about how many records do you think?

Steinski

30 or 40.

Jeff “Chairman” Mao

Up until when did they stop?

Steinski

Dicky Goodman died about six or seven years ago, maybe not even that long ago. I think he was doing them... He just liked doing them, they were fun to do. He couldn’t get them on the radio after a while. They didn’t sell but he kept doing them.

Jeff “Chairman” Mao

So they were more or less a comedy team or... ?

Steinski

I’d say yeah. It was considered radio comedy, you know, [makes finger quotes gesture] “novelty” records. That was a very direct thing that Douglas and I both knew about and drew on the idea of this, very fast, quick cutting-type stuff.

Jeff “Chairman” Mao

So I guess when you first heard hip-hop, this appealed to you as you had this sensibility of mixing and matching different things. I think it might be interesting to try and describe that time right before you did the “Lessons” a little bit more in depth. Just how you experienced that, as far as... Did you hear any hip-hop records that struck you in the same way?

Steinski

Oh sure, yeah. Keith LeBlanc’s “Malcolm X.” That was different because he had this loping beat that pretty much kept on and he dropped spoken word over top of it. Now obviously, Douglas and I have an enormous affection for spoken word records. My records almost universally use it very very liberally, legally and illegally. The musical qualities of speech is a very big deal to me. So the Malcolm X thing was there... In terms of other stuff that was around, I really liked Laurie Anderson’s records, they were very hip – “O Superman,” “Walk the Dog” were certainly very influential for me.

Jeff “Chairman” Mao

I guess, also, it’s important to remember that the clubs which you mention – Negril and Roxy – are clubs in New York City in the early ‘80s downtown. And this was a time when a lot of cats from the Bronx and uptown were coming downtown and starting to mix with the downtown crowd.

Steinski

Yeah, and Bambaataa would play anything that he thought was funky. Anything, anything, anything, which was wonderful. A liberal field that is noted more by its loss these days than not, at least in larger clubs. I think in smaller clubs you’d still find a lot of really adventurous DJs. But that was a time when the downtown sensibility of people like Laurie Anderson and David Byrne and some of the bands like Konk were heard in clubs that were playing ESG, that were playing early rap records by Peter Brown, stuff that Peter Brown had produced. It was pretty great. You could hear records with sound effects on them, Davey D’s first record “One For the Treble” had that car peeling away that got scratched, which was pretty cool.

It was a time of experimentation, not like now when people go to a club and say, “What kind of hip-hop are they playing? Are they playing commercial club bangers with keyboard beats, so we all know what it sounds like? Was it beats or indie or all loops?” It wasn’t like that. It was just anything that was coming down the pipe that was funky, it was, “Yeah, fair game.” It was a fine time, it was a great time to be involved and it certainly shaped my sensibilities for good or ill. I am not sitting here because I am some “bling bling” producer who flew in on his private jet with a diamond in his tooth. Nonetheless, it opened up the possibilities of what a person could do. I think you do see it in lots of independent hip-hop now.

Jeff “Chairman” Mao

It would be interesting to hear exactly what the process was like when you began making these “Lesson” records. Did you have an idea of what you wanted to start with?

Steinski

That’s pretty much all we ever had, what the opening was going to be. [tweaking his hands] “Well let’s take this and then we maybe can move it into that.” And then it was always, “Well, now what?” and then “Well... let’s try this,” “Nah, doesn’t work, let’s try this,” “Yeah, maybe, let’s put that on.” And then we’d find something else that worked and then we’d realize what we really liked about that first thing was that we wanted to loop something. Loop a piece out of it for, say, two bars. So we’d put a couple of loops in there and then, [making turning and chopping hand gestures] “Ah, you know, we’ve got this guy saying this, let’s do that and” – now we come to the pay off – “if he finishes right here then it’ll be a great, dramatic opening and we can sneak a little noise in there to try and juice the transition.”

And that’s how... Basically, Douglas did it and I was coming in with lots of elements and sitting there going, “Well, you know, maybe if it got faster here or louder there,” or this, that or the other. I was learning from him at the time, because now I make a lot of records without him – although I still make records with him and we have a very good time – I learned a lot of these techniques from him at the time. And these were things we would just be noticing, like, “Why did some segues work at the Roxy and others not?” Well, the way the scratching worked, they would let it go a little bit and then pull it back and then let it go, and they would cut the first record, then the silence and then they would let the second record go.

So this was all us learning on the dancefloor, as we were going there every week. You get it imprinted in your genetic code, pretty much. Anybody here who is a working club DJ knows that. The more you do it, the more you know, “This one’s going to work, boom!” And even if it gets a little old after a while, because it works all the time and you don’t have anything to replace it with, so you keep doing it. Whatever “it” is. That’s how we learned. We watched these segues happen and we saw these techniques applied. And we mixed them with Douglas’s abilities in the studio, my selection of records and our mutual love of... “Oh, if we use this it would be really funny. Let’s use Bugs Bunny. Let’s use the Marx Brothers.” We both like that “drop-it (squeaks) hoohoo kind of feel to it.”

Jeff “Chairman” Mao

You just mentioned briefly talking about legalities. Obviously, this record was in every true sense of the word an underground smash, being bootlegged and available only on cassette copy and whatnot. Was it frustrating to not have gone any further? Or did you feel that you’d gotten the most mileage out of it, because of what the limitations were, legally?

Steinski

At the time our approach to this was a little different. We weren’t two young producers who wanted to make our lives in hip-hop. We both had jobs. I was essentially an advertising agency executive and Douglas was a fairly highly paid studio engineer. We did this thing, we met all the people in the world we’d ever wanted to meet and then some. And we had the gratification that people all over were listening and really diggin’ this record. It didn’t occur to us that we should exploit this and perhaps that’s to our detriment. It was a really long time before we made another record. I kept making records as a hobby, to sort of learn how to do it better and better. When I finally got a hold of ProTools, that was when I sort of got a rocket up my butt and was like, “Oh, OK, I could do this, I could do that…”

That’s when we made the remix of “Jazzy Sensation” for Tommy Boy’s 10th or 15th anniversary. That was when we really showed the ProTools influence because all of a sudden we were working with 64 tracks, we had digital editing, we could stretch stuff, we could put tons of effects on it, we did all kinds of stuff with that. Possibly our best record together, I think. And also wildly illegal. As far as the legal issues go, I mean it’s obvious. We were – and are – given the choice, total thieves. We have no regard whatsoever for copyright. It doesn’t mean that our records should be sold, it doesn’t mean it should be right, but it’s what we do. We are audio collage artists and if you just take away the audio part, we are right there with artists whose work is hanging on museum walls and gallery walls as collage artists. The only difference is that our work is digitally replicable. Therefore the damage, if you wish, can spread much wider than a Joseph Cornell collage of a lot of recognizable elements. Because it’s only one of his works and there can be theoretically zillions of ours. And, also, Joseph Cornell is working in the visual medium. We are working in a medium, where copyright has grown from, “What?,” to a minor annoyance to a plutonium bomb. But it hasn’t stopped us yet.

Jeff “Chairman” Mao

What was your reaction upon hearing stuff that was influenced by some of your records. You could probably point to Prince Paul’s stuff with De La Soul and the Bomb Squad, Coldcut, etc.?

Steinski

The Bomb Squad and Prince Paul, I am so flattered to think that our stuff would have shown up in theirs. I think that Paul is the closest thing hip-hop has to an authentic genius. And the Bomb Squad stuff was just amazing when it came out. I didn’t know what to think about that stuff, it was so incredible. Coldcut, I’ve become really friendly with them and I have a very close association with Ninja Tune now. A lot of artists [on Ninja Tune] reflect that in certain ways. Probably Kid Koala. He has amazing talents in many other directions. Certainly his use of spoken word reflects that. We’ve seen our stuff show up in a lot of different places and I’m always very flattered. I’m always very gratified that it strikes a note in people. I got into advertising not to become rich, but because I thought this was a cool way to project what I think into other people’s minds. When I got disillusioned with advertising it didn’t mean I got disillusioned with doing that. Getting them to dance is a part of it, getting them to listen is a part of it and the technique is a part of it. And that’s very gratifying to see.

Jeff “Chairman” Mao

There’s been your “Lessons” are one, two and three and more than a couple of people have recorded a Lesson four.

Steinski

Oh yeah, sorry folks, jetlag. Chemist and Shadow, absolutely. Both of whom are cool people that I have met, very nice. I performed with them, they were nice enough to get me on stage to do two of the lessons live at the Skratch Piklz demise party at the Fillmore in San Francisco. That was quite an evening. I missed a good half of my cues, I’d say. The biggest thing that came out of the that evening, besides the fact that I remember I was walking into the bathroom of the Fillmore thinking, “Boy! Jimi Hendrix used that toilet too,” was just pretty amazing. The other thing that came out of it was the staggering professionalism of Chemist and Shadow in what they had done. They had broken down the instrumental part of two of our records completely and recreated them perfectly on four turntables. And when I say perfectly, I mean so perfectly that I showed up... Now, granted, we didn’t have much rehearsal time, we had only four hours to rehearse. My samples weren’t tuned for speed, I thought I will just slop them down there, because I thought their record speeds will be all over. But, no…

Jeff “Chairman” Mao

What did you bring with you?

Steinski

I used an Akai S1000 sampler and was loading it through zip discs and had a keyboard that was labeled with all the samples in my nice little homebrew fashion, which more or less worked. You can see me on stage with them in the movie Scratch. Them holding down the fort and me kinda messing up. But still, it was a thrill and an amazing thing to do. Don’t forget for a long time I was out of the world of hip-hop, for the most part. I didn’t like to listen to gangster rap, was not aware that there was an underground scene happening, that there was independent hip-hop going on. I just went back into my record collection, had a radio show, played a little bit of hip-hop but played all kinds of stuff. It was a very electic thing, I played bluegrass, played old jazz, modern classical and all kinds of stuff. And then someone walked into my studio saying, “Hey you, you see this record from this guy DJ Shadow, Endtroducing.....? He namechecked you guys on this.” I looked at the record and thought, “Damn! Who is this guy?” I had no idea. Same thing with Cut Chemist – “Lessons.” “Did you know this guy did a ‘Lessons’ record? They did??” It was all news to me. That was part of the great awakening of coming back into the world of making records.

Jeff “Chairman” Mao

There’ve been quite a few other lessons. Are you tired of lessons?

Steinski

[laughs] Using the word “lessons,” unfortunately, made it sound like [exaggerating in hip-hop style], “And now we gonna drop some science on y’all, yo. So pay attention!” Really what it came down to was, I had instruction records with some guy saying, “Lesson so and so,” on them. That was a good introduction. So we did that once and we did it again. We’re totally not coming into the room, trying to show anybody what was what. I have no bad feelings for the other Lessons out there. I met DJ Bombjack, who did “Lesson 7.” And there are a couple of other lessons running around. I saw bootlegs of Ultimate Lessons, Shadow’s live stuff in France and all that. And people come up, “Didn’t you get really pissed off about it?” No, I wish I thought of it, actually. I’m not pissed off. Other than that, that was pretty much it.

Jeff “Chairman” Mao

And what about if we get to “Lesson 78” or something, what about that?

Steinski

[laughs] Well, we’ll have to see about that. Actually, the one thing that I don’t want is to get so thoroughly associated with the old school that everybody’s like, “Yeah, let’s see Steinski play some old hip-hop records.” It’s like, “Thank you, no!” I’d like to move myself into some more modern point of view here. You know, I’m trying...

Jeff “Chairman” Mao

Do you want to play something?

Steinski

Let’s play something from this and then we probably ought to take some questions, as I’m tired of talking about what a fabulous guy I am.

This is a mix that I did when I came back from the Fillmore playing with Chemist and Shadow. Coldcut mentioned to me, very casually, about making a mix for their radio show, which was, again, very flattering. So I sat down and my first thouht was, “I’ll do a mix like I used to do for my radio shows on WMFU, where I just pick out a whole bunch of different records, do some jazzy segues and let go like that.” But I started working on it and thought, “No, this really isn’t going to work. They don’t play bluegrass, they don’t play modern classical music. What I want to do for them is do a rhythmic mix and I want to do the best I can.” I thought it would take me like two weeks or a month. It took me a year and a half. I tried to pawn it off on Douglas to mix – it was at that point eight gigs [gigabytes] on a drive, which I brought over to his studio. He called me up and said, “You know, it takes 15 minutes to just open this job in ProTools?! I can’t mix this thing, take it away!” After a couple of months I mixed it, revising it extensively while I did it. And I used a whole bunch of stuff, as you can imagine. This is a piece of it.

(music: Steinski – “Untitled Mix”)

That is a New York perfomance artist called Danny Hoch, who has a CD called Jails, Hospitals and Hip-Hop, named after the show that he did. The show is excellent, CD is excellent. That is a severely edited piece of one of his characters, who’s a mainstream rapper and who is talking, basically, about how ethically deficient he is. I set it over a couple of different beats that were all working together. It was a lot of fun to do and, again, it’s narrative. It’s a guy talking, I like people talking. Very important to me.

Jeff “Chairman” Mao

Where did you get [the name] Steinski?

Steinski

Very quickly when we had to come up with a name for the contest entry. Actually, it wasn’t even mine, it was a friend of mine. Douglas had already come up with Double D. He called himself Double D. And we had just finished it [the track], and were about to send it in and I was having lunch with a friend of mine. And she said, “And who you’re going to be? Steinski?” Because “ski” was a suffix that was being added to lot of names. “Joeski” and “Bobski” and like that. So she thought that it would be absolutely hilarious, that I might be Steinski. And I said, “Yeah, I think I will.” The lesson there is be careful what kind of name you choose. You might be living with it for a long time. I know DJ Yoda in Britain regrets it terribly, you know?