---

See more posts by Regina Small

0 comments

A couple years ago, the store started offering DJ lessons, and so, on a recent Saturday, I shuffled in for a lesson. After years of sports (hand-eye coordination) and guitar (ear), I thought I'd have a good shot at picking up the necessary skills. But I was wrong. As my instructor, DJ DP One told me, “Nowadays, everyone’s a DJ. But it takes practice and passion, and it’s not as easy as just pressing a button, though that’s what many people think.” In this democratized media environment, where the playing field has only gotten larger because of easy access to music, separating yourself from other DJs is hard work.

Like a lot of Rock and Soul fans, DJ DP One has been orbiting the store for decades. He told me he started shopping here when he was a kid (he's 34 now) and feels like he grew up here. "Being able to teach here is so cool."

The lesson felt not unlike one you'd take in guitar or piano at your local music store, with the same parallel from theory to practice. First DJ DP One explained the fundamentals, then demonstrated how these techniques are applied. Place your hand here, move your fingers there, because you don’t want to pop the needle off the groove or accidentally hit the on/off button. I had a few flashbacks of sitting in my college dorm room learning how to hold the guitar. Fondling the fader switch was like learning to hold a pick; counting bars between songs and figuring out when to add the other track was like switching chords or modulating notes. And just as with the guitar, I had to learn a new vocabulary: scratch, baby scratch, the ah, chirping, forwards, release headphones, release volume. And this was before even learning about the equipment: two turntables, the mixer, the computer and all the computer programs.

Just like any other instrument, in order to get better, you have to practice, practice, practice. “I practice at least two hours a day,” DJ DP One told me. “I’m still practicing basics because a lot of new techniques come from foundational techniques.”

During our two hours together, the lesson ranged across everything from technique (“Make your hand into a ‘v’ and place it in the left pocket of the record.”) to where not to practice (“I don’t recommend practicing in front of a crowd because everyone hears your mistakes if your timing and selection is off.”).

He also doled out advice on playing gigs: “Every place has a different energy and vibe that can dictate song selection and strategies. For example, if the crowd is chill, let the song go. If it’s a party, play bits of songs to keep people on their toes. No two crowds are the same, so you gotta feel the crowd. Also, take notes as you’re spinning: how do the songs flow, how can I make this mix better.”

Before my own lesson, I observed DJ DP One in another one-on-one session with a student. During it, he described the steps that any working musician must pass through, no matter his or her genre. Besides the requisite practicing and honing your craft, you also need to hustle. You need to connect with promoters and club owners; you need to apprentice with better DJs and learn from them; you need to take advantage of every little opportunity you get, like when a DJ-friend needs to take a 15 minute break between sets, ask to take the turntables for a spin; open up for more well-known DJs; play at shitty clubs for, literally, beer and peanuts. And then do it again the next day. Talk to any big time band and I guarantee you they will tell you stories about the time they played this little bar, opening up for some other band, only to get screwed out of money. Paying your dues is the great equalizer.

This is one of the advantages of visiting Rock and Soul if you’re a DJ. A steady stream of professional DJs stop by there, and a young and hungry DJ can network with some of the best. Several of them give back to the store by giving these DJ lessons, as they know what it’s like to be in the young’uns kicks.

“I’ve been coming through here since the late 80s,” DJ Mell Starr, who also gives lessons (and was recently on BET’s Master of the Mix DJ/reality competition), told me. “The people that work here—I’ve known them for so long. I used to come here and not buy, just to say hello. It’s a home place.”

After just one lesson, it was clear that my body is not as fluid as my mind thinks it is. Trying to spin with my left hand while moving the fader with my right, and then reversing to spin with my right and adjust the volume with my left proved much harder than running a major seventh arpeggio up and down the neck of a guitar. I also learned that, as with other areas of life, having a good teacher makes all the difference. DJ DP One could have easily brushed off my dumb questions—Do I really have to wear headphones? I have a huge monitor blasting beats right in front of me!—but didn’t, and had answers to all of them. The earphones, by the way, are so that you can queue up songs and know when to switch decks.

Hanging out at the store you hear a lot of great stories, like the time Harrison Ford came in with his DJ son or when Q-Tip got kicked out for taking the plastic off a vinyl. That’s what happens when you’re in the same midtown spot for three-and-a-half decades. But my favorite story is this one:

In the mid-1990’s, Wyclef Jean walked into Rock and Soul not too long after the release of his album, The Carnival. Posters featuring a picture of him were up all over the store. He walked to the register and began to pay with a credit card when one of the store's owners, Shirley Bechor, asked him for his ID. Jean didn't carry ID, so he grabbed a copy of his album matched it to his face with a huge smile. Shirley laughed and rang him up.


Related: When Did The Remix Become A Requirement and Playing Tennis At Grand Central

Josh Sternberg is a writer based in Brooklyn. You can follow him on Twitter or Tumblr or his blog. Photos by the author and Josh Wolff.

---

See more posts by Josh Sternberg

1 comments

---

See more posts by Choire Sicha

12 comments

Julie: Well, to me, Madonna is like the Catholic Church or Penn State. I’ll defend anything she does, even when she's guilty. I’m loyal to the institution.

Natasha: What did you think of her football fruits?

Julie: I thought they were great.

Natasha: DON'T LIE!!

Julie: I thought she should have worn different shoes.

Natasha: This is like when the Catholic Church or Penn State blamed a sex abuse scandal on a couple bad apples!

Julie: The medley was tight, the concepts were good, it looked great and I'd say she sounded great if there was any evidence of her singing live. I like her new song.

Natasha: JULIE YOU DO NOT BELIEVE THAT!

Julie: I do.

Natasha: Do I need to provide fossil evidence?

Julie: What is your fossil fuel?

Natasha: WELL. I, too defend Madge against the haters. On message boards, in chat rooms, pool halls and in my prayers. She is an icon and nothing that she can do, ever, will diminish her. And I respect that she didn't burn out into some awful tragedy so as to be forever embalmed in youthful glamor.

Julie: Youthful is the operative term.

Natasha: Like I'm sure if Marilyn lived it would have been GRISLY. But... but... The new song, the pleather gestapo boots, the weird annexation of other lady singers? I am underwhelmed! I think we deserve better! Also, girl, that video was an abooooorsssh.

Julie: You didn't like it when she shot those football players with a gun? After coming out in a trenchcoat, COLUMBINE STYLE?

Natasha: I always support the promiscuous blending of vodka ads and columbine imagery! BUT the video looked cheap and slap-dashed, and tonight's show felt soulless. Like, she turned on the jumbo jet of her fame but not her SOulLlLl

Julie: I'm worried about her youth obsession.

Natasha: Continue. Cuz this is my main complaint with her.

Julie: Well, her insistence on maintaining an exhaustingly current entourage, instead of changing/evolving/ageing, she just switches up the collaborators so they're current. That’s depressing.

Natasha: I think she's out-grown trying to be sexually provocative and sexily antagonistic a la Express Yourself, but now she is lost.

Julie: Well, she wants to be SEXY.

Natasha: Remember her Frozen phase?

Julie: I loved that. I loved Ray of Light. I loved loved Music. Confessions on a Dance Floor is her last GREAT album. I’m just worried about her mosquito in amber ambitions. The skin thing, her hair getting longer. She’s only wearing black, She only lets them shoot her from across the stadium.

Natasha: What would Madonna doing Madonna actually look like now? Without the youthful accessories and shackle shoes?

Julie: I want her to be like Anjelica Huston. But she wants to be a girl, not just a woman.

Natasha: What is ANGELICA? In essence?

Julie: Being beautiful because of a quiet confidence and deep elegance, and loveable and regal and dignified, without worrying about being matronly.

Natasha: I feel like Madge would have been amazing with just two other people and so roman slaves or cartwheeling b-boys.

Natasha: Like THIS:

Julie: She's wearing penny loafers! Compare that to the stiletto boots. She can actually move in those, and those are her real hairs!

Natasha: When did she stop? When did the break come?

Julie: Hard Candy. I think. Some people think it was before that. But I think HUNG UP was amazing.

Natasha: HUNG WAS INCREDIBLE. It felt authentically her! With the leg warmers! And her arms and body hard as rock but still so graceful and feminine.

Julie: I don't think being attractive to straight men is the goal of pop music. But.... when straight men are sort of revolted by you, and have so much hatred and contempt, at least in my twitter feed, you have to step back and say 'why am i hated only in the way that those same guys hate, say, the real housewives who have had extensive plastic surgery?" Because that's the only paralleled vitriol, not including Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann. And it has to do with aging poorly. And not conforming to either whore OR mother. She's in between and she hasn't embraced the elder role. And she won't.

Natasha: Where do you think it comes from?

Julie: Her stubborn refusal to age gracefully?

Julie: Fear.

Julie: Anger

Julie: Contempt.

Natasha: Where does the male scorn come from?

Julie: Her lack of concern for an audience different than her essentialists.

Julie: Also she's sinewy and fat free.

Julie: So she's not soft like a fuckable little lithe girl or a mom who feeds you from the breast. I wish the road not taken with her was visible to us. Which was: fat Italian momma.

Julie: Well, her desperation to seem and look young, in a girlish way, with long blonde hair and hot pants and stiletto boots she can't dance in, is hugely unappealing to straight men.

Natasha: Why do you think?

Julie: It telegraphs as "crazy."

Julie: And crazy is poison to straight men. Even coupled with hot, it's unworkable-with.

Julie: She's also NOT THAT OLD! Jane Fonda is in her 70s! Helen Mirren was the hot slut to profess one’s desire to boink recently! Remember how young straight guys would be like "isn't it crazy I want to fuck Helen Mirren?" And you're like oh wow, you're such a feminist.

Natasha: Because she's a perfect model?

Natasha: And has amazing symmetrical features and giant tits?

Natasha: Brave.

Julie: Right. Because she's not 16. And the ladies on my p0rn are!

Natasha: Does Madonna still read as a 'bitch'?

Julie: Madonna has always read as a bitch. But that's not a problem, at least when you're committed and urgent and vital and authentic. It's the falseness that people see in her character. That becomes the problem.

Natasha: But she has that theater bitch thing not that aloof brat thing.

Julie: Aloofness is something she's had to grapple with, post-Evita. And by aloof I mean pretentious. Or being seen as pretentious. It's the only American sin. America HATES pretentiousness more than craziness, greed, pretty much everything. So moving to england, kabbalah, all that didn't help her public image. But by then she didn't care. And then she adopted the black boy. And her charitable efforts read like Jesus juice. Messiah stuff.

Natasha: Well isn't also that she taps into that vital fear that she will suck out your vitality and leave you dry and/or directing Rock n Rolla?

Julie: Yes. That was the Yoko backlash.

Julie: The idea that she made Guy Ritchie a shitty director is so offensive to me. Guy Ritchie had a part in that process.

Natasha: Because he was always terrible?

Julie: If anything, Robert Downie Jr. helped!

Natasha: Are we getting the Madonna we deserve?

Julie: Maybe. (And this is me being kind, because I always will.)

Julie: She's in her first wives club phase. This is her first divorce record, or second if you count Hard Candy. Which was all about being miles away from Guy and having nothing in common. So maybe once she settles, she'll reinvent herself or be more comfortable being alone and perimenopausal?

Julie: But what I think is that her narcissism is so rich that she needs a wreck, like her post-Erotica backlash, in order to come back with a Ray of Light. Like, she came out last night dressed like a Phoenix rising from the ashes... but we haven't burned her down yet. After SEX and EROTICA, America burned her at the stake. And that's what it took for her to come back and be brilliant and genius, and enter her second act with, like, zen realness. She earned her long hair then.

Natasha: Well that is the true mark of Diva, an American Diva, one who suffers torment and mass strife and then soars.

Natasha: LIKE JENNIFER HUDSON LOLLOL.

Julie: It's so Catholic. Hmm, in that example, what's her cross to bear? Weight Watchers? Or her family being murdered? Remember when I made that joke? "Poor Jennifer Hudson—her family, and her breasts, are gone"?

Natasha: No but you're a hero for doing so.

Julie: Madge needs to be destroyed, in order to be challenged.

Natasha: Do you think she'll be destroyed for tonight?

Julie: Nope. She played it safe. Her medley was water tight. Those songs are POWERFUL.

Natasha: Remember when she rapped?

Julie: I do yoga and pilates and the room is full of hotties? That was a misstep.

Natasha: That was a fumble. (To couch this in football idioms.)

Julie: Yeah, but she recovered with Confessions. And the Drowned World tour, when she hatched from a disco ball at the top of that show, and danced around with riding crops. Post horse fall? That was some McQueen shit.

Natasha: AH YES. I miss Madonna McQueen. She needs more audacious collaborators.

Julie: She needs to make stars, not use kids. She hangs out with the popular kids. But she IS the popular kid. Stop rotating in Nicki or LMFAO or whoever else. Bring in Candy Darling. Divine. Get a new Jellybean. Break somebody.

Natasha: Is there an icon of her magnitude who has done a similar autumn of her years gracefully?

Julie: Cher. Even though her surgery cuts off criticism at the pass because of her blunt authenticity. Her consistency, unlike Madonna's, is not desperation. She's like the Anjelica of pop music. Cher's sense of humor also cuts any sense of pretentiousness. Like, Cher's won a fucking Oscar.

Natasha: TWO!

Julie: Well.

Natasha: Also: Chaz Bono.

Julie: I can't even start. But look at Cher.

Natasha: I ALWAYS AM.

Julie: Cher will do something like Burlesque, and nobody will throw pigs blood tweets at her. That's because she has a sense of humor about herself. She's completely consistent with her goals and her attitudes. She does sarcasm well. And she just "seems" really authentic.

Julie: Although Madonna HAS begun smiling more in her performances, which is weird.

Natasha: Madge has always been a bit brittle in the self-deprecating department?

Julie: She smiled like three times tonight.

Natasha: I noticed that!

Julie: She's trying to be playful. I don't like Madonna in whimsy mode. But her smiling is her only hat tip to aging, I think.

Natasha: SHE'S IMPERIAL.

Julie: It's one of the smallest things you can do to seem less menacing. But unless you're Dame Maggie Smith, aka HILARIOUS, you have to smile.

Natasha: Tell that to the NYT autism kids.

Julie: Oh I would love to. I would love to spend my time explaining Madonna to autistic children. Anyway, so look. Warhol died young. Gaga is on a meth pace. She's on a broadband track to this pop stardom/ art thing. Madonna is a living GREAT ARTIST and there are burdens to that. Look at, like, Lou Reed. Look at HIS collaboration lately!

Natasha: No. I can't.

Natasha: Don't make me.

Julie: But... look at Almodovar

Natasha: OK!

Julie: Or, look at Woody Allen. That guy still gets blow jobs from the Academy because of Annie Hall.

Natasha: He's gonna get a slobbery one in two weeks come Midnight in Paris' original screenplay winnnn.

Julie: It's the least we can do to give Madonna a pass for a great medley she kind of paced through in bad shoes because of, like, literally, pick JUST ONE SONG.

Julie: Annie Hall —> Express Yourself.

Julie: Crimes & Misdemeanors—> La Isla Bonita.

Julie: Hannah & Her Sisters—>Vogue.

Julie: You get it. And I hated Midnight in Paris. I enjoyed Hard Candy more.

Natasha: So you think she can hop back on?

Julie: I hope she can and I will be there for everything she ever does. And I will always root for her and I will always be here to defend her. But I fear she may need to be shot down to a lowness before she resurrects with the potential I still believe she has, and always will have.

Natasha: Amen.

Julie: Just one more thing. She uses young people now in the way bell hooks accused her of using queer people and people of color in Truth or Dare: both as accessories and sources from which to steal. The youth around her, now, draw attention to her flaws—AND NOT PHYSICAL ONES. (I mean, if one more fat straight guy makes fun of her appearance on twitter... Jesus. Like you're the French guy from The Artist??) So I don't mean her skin or her face or arms or whatever. I mean her soul flaw, which is stubborness, falseness, and contempt.

Natasha: Her soul holes.

Julie: Her little monsters are her collaborators. She's so distant from her fans at this point they don't even get an acknowledgment.

Natasha: I agree, I think that's why it's been particularly difficult to watch the whole Nicki and MIA collaboration. Those two women, you can say a lot about how much planning goes into their image and how much of a construction it all is but those constructions are working.

Natasha: Resonating. It was weird to watch them have to be stilted in her presence.

Julie: Yes.

Natasha: Madge doesn't need to pull from their fires but it seemed like an intentional dimming.

Natasha: Or as they say... THROWING SHADE.

Julie: Yes! Paris is burning after all.

Julie Klausner and Natasha Vargas-Cooper still believe.

---

See more posts by Julie Klausner and Natasha Vargas-Cooper

45 comments

---

See more posts by Choire Sicha

3 comments

---

See more posts by Alex Balk

1 comments

The adorable and fun-loving Imperial Teen (who I always think of as the original New Pornographers; their excellent first album, 1996's "Seasick," did predate the Pornographers by three years, but that's irrelevant, they don't have that much in common, besides being awesome and having a love of jaunty pop) have a new album out today! You can stream the whole album right here. Or even purchase it!

---

See more posts by Choire Sicha

4 comments

In other Eleanor news: she is guest-starring on the Portlandia Live tour, beginning February 19th in Philly. But before that, she's doing her very own West Coast tour, starting February 2nd, wending her way north from San Diego to Seattle. (More info here, and yes, that includes SF and Portland.)

Hey, while we are here: would you like to download her live EP, for free, simply in exchange for going on her mailing list? I certainly would and indeed just have done so. Merge Records would love to make that happen for you, right here.

---

See more posts by Choire Sicha

4 comments

Even among music fans the name Ronnie Lane doesn't come up much. I'm not sure why. He was an original—"the East End urchin with the pastoral vision," as Mojo put it —and about as unlikely a rock figure as you're likely to find. The bassist and songwriter for British bands the Small Faces and the Faces, Lane gave it all up for a curious (to put it mildly) solo career: he ran away and formed a circus. But then he never had been a good fit for heady 1970s rock stardom: consider the fact that while the other members of the Faces were buying mansions and Rolls Royces, Lane remained in his £7 a week apartment in the uber-British-sounding town of Twickenham. And while the Faces toured America in private jets, Lane drove with his family from city to city in a Land Rover.

The Faces had formed in 1969 as a successor to the Small Faces: singer Steve Marriott had gone off to form another group, and in came vocalist Rod Stewart and guitarist Ron Wood. After four strong albums Lane left the band, unhappy that they were increasingly perceived as "Rod Stewart and the Faces." After this departure, Lane made his best (and least remembered) music. It was a short, fascinating and, ultimately, tragic career—and it was largely received with indifference. As his friend Bucks Burnett said, "Ronnie Lane entertained, and the world—for the most part—yawned." But Lane must have known something like that could happen: he named his post-Faces band Slim Chance.

You may actually be familiar with one of Lane's best songs. That would be "Ooh La La," and if you do know it, it might be because of the movie Rushmore. The bittersweet Faces song was an appropriate closing track for not only Rushmore but for the Faces' final album as well. It's Ron Wood, not Lane, who sings the version above. Here's another version with Lane singing.

It was after this album, also titled Ooh La La, that Lane exited the Faces. So what do you do once you've left a lucrative, world-touring British band at the height of their massive popularity, bearing in mind that this is the 1970s? If you guessed, "buy some land on the English-Welsh border and sink all your money into a ruinously expensive traveling circus and musical act (plus an Airstream converted into a mobile recording unit)," you'd not only be correct but remarkably precise. A circus complete with barkers, lion tamers, musicians, and regrettably "the world's unfunniest clowns" was the "only answer," Lane told Circus (a music, not big top, magazine).

The assessment in Mojo was a little different: they called it "a grand yet foolhardy undertaking." However you see it, the circus was certainly fitting for Lane, who by all accounts was a charming rascal of the highest order, given to playfulness and pranks. One of his funniest: in his early days working at an electronics factory, Lane would lock himself in a soundproof testing room with a coffee and the paper; when someone banged on the door demanding he open up, Lane would wriggle out of the room through a hole he'd cut in the wall, sidle up behind the person knocking, and say, "Are you looking for me?" Perhaps it comes as no surprise that Lane was born on April Fools' Day.

While his first single "How Come" was a hit, coming in at #11 on the charts, things generally had a way of not working out for Ronnie Lane. He failed to achieve a crucial second hit with "The Poacher": when Lane was to perform the song on Top of the Pops the BBC cameramen went on strike, causing the song to languish and barely crack the Top 40. (The above video is from a later performance.)

But Lane was anyway busy with The Passing Show, his traveling circus, and when he wasn't on the road he herded sheep and played music on his hillside. Not only did he play on the that hillside, he recorded there too: on his first album with Slim Chance, 1974's rustic, wheat-between-the-teeth Anymore for Anymore, you can hear band members' children running around and shouting.

Lane eventually had to shut down the circus. Given all those performers and trucks and tents, the Passing Show was the exact opposite of profitable. Lane did manage to earn some money, and a few rock history footnotes, by renting out his Airstream recording studio: Led Zeppelin recorded part of Physical Graffiti and the Who part of Quadrophenia there.

Soon things changed dramatically. After releasing two more excellent Slim Chance albums, Ronnie Lane's Slim Chance (1975) and One for the Road (1976), Lane began work on an album with Pete Townshend. During the recording of that album, the critically lauded Rough Mix, it became apparent that something was very wrong with Lane. As recounted in The Passing Show, a BBC documentary, Eric Clapton noticed his friend's problem when Lane was onstage: "He wasn't actually hitting the strings... it was sort of just hovering above." Townshend saw it too: "He couldn't balance, he couldn't stand up, and I just thought he was drunk." Lane, who certainly loved a tipple, wasn't drunk: he had multiple sclerosis.

Thus ended his most creative and productive years. (He managed to release one more album in 1979, See Me, but it's his least engaging.) Lane experimented with various treatments—including injections of snake venom—and in hyperbaric oxygen therapy he found both physical relief and a new cause. With an eye towards opening a London hyperbaric oxygen chamber Lane organized a benefit concert with some of his friends, among them Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Bill Wyman, and Glyn Johns. The 1983 Royal Albert Hall concert was such a success that they took the act to America, but (to make a sad story short) Lane entrusted the proceeds to a charity (which he helped found) run by an MS-afflicted attorney with a penchant for misappropriation. Lawsuits, countersuits and vanishing funds: it was all a great embarrassment for Lane.

Lane lived out his final years in Texas and then Colorado. Completely robbed of his musical gifts with the exception of his voice (itself greatly damaged) Lane performed from his wheelchair in small clubs. Playing with local musicians he became something of an Austin institution. Throughout Lane kept his humor: asked how his treatment was going, he would joke, "Well a mosquito bit me this morning—and it died," and when President Reagan sent a personal letter Lane claimed to have celebrated by snorting coke off of it. But despite his humor Lane was obviously suffering. When he heard about the 1991 death of his old friend and band member Steve Marriott, who burned up in a house fire, Lane responded, "I'm jealous."

But let's go back a bit, shall we, and end things on a more positive, Lane-esque note. What follows is, to my thinking, the strongest available Ronnie Lane performance. Lane was always an eager and engaging performer, but I don't think he gets any better or more soulful than he does here around the 3:00 mark.

It's a song that should play in every pub at the end of every night. The best for last. One for the road.

Josh Lieberman holds a bachelor's degree from an accredited institution. He recently wrote about lost travel writing for the Paris Review Daily.

---

See more posts by Josh Lieberman

17 comments

17. Gogol Bordello

16. Stone Temple Pilots

15. Sheb Wooley

14. Beanie Sigel

13. Cam'ron

12. New Riders of the Purple Sage

11. Vanity 6

10. Grace Jones

9. Three 6 Mafia

8. UGK

7. DJ Screw

6. Moby Grape

5. Purple City

4. Jimi Hendrix

3. ASAP Rocky

2. Deep Purple

1. Prince

---

See more posts by Dave Bry

13 comments