Night People Quotes

“Proud enough to play in the club even, so I went up to Sterling Sound to have it pressed onto my own acetate. The studio engineer hunched over a lathe—a bulky device resembling an industrial sewing machine, with a twelve-inch platter at its base. After listening once and tweaking some dials, he placed a pristine, smooth piece of vinyl on the platter and pressed play on my digital audio tape, and the machine’s head descended onto the blank vinyl. Slowly, it began carving into the surface, writing our song into the wax. Technically, the stylus was etching grooves by drawing amplitudes and frequencies. But from where I stood, this machine was sculpting music. The purpose of an acetate is to create a sonically perfect master copy, which is then electroplated and turned into a “stamp” to press the audio onto more vinyl, which gets slipped into sleeves and shipped to stores. Watching the lathe do its thing, my mind drifted to the engineer who performed this task for “Le Freak,” producing a master disc that would go on to birth millions of replicas. And how, one day in 1978, a DJ like Black Passions Inc. walked into Sounds, bought his copy, and spread its magic across nightclubs, block parties, cookouts, and roller rinks throughout the city. Then, in 1994, I bought his old copy off a street vendor on West Fourth Street and spun this disco classic across New York City a thousand more times. The sacred magic of “Le Freak” belonged to Chic, but its gospel was spread by DJs like us. The lathe was a mint, printing joy and ecstasy. The engineer printed up a label, slapped it on the disc, and sent me on my way.”
― Mark Ronson, Night People: How to Be a DJ in '90s New York City

“Proud enough to play in the club even, so I went up to Sterling Sound to have it pressed onto my own acetate. The studio engineer hunched over a lathe—a bulky device resembling an industrial sewing machine, with a twelve-inch platter at its base. After listening once and tweaking some dials, he placed a pristine, smooth piece of vinyl on the platter and pressed play on my digital audio tape, and the machine’s head descended onto the blank vinyl. Slowly, it began carving into the surface, writing our song into the wax. Technically, the stylus was etching grooves by drawing amplitudes and frequencies. But from where I stood, this machine was sculpting music. The purpose of an acetate is to create a sonically perfect master copy, which is then electroplated and turned into a “stamp” to press the audio onto more vinyl, which gets slipped into sleeves and shipped to stores. Watching the lathe do its thing, my mind drifted to the engineer who performed this task for “Le Freak,” producing a master disc that would go on to birth millions of replicas.”
― Mark Ronson, Night People: How to Be a DJ in '90s New York City

“Before long, I was spending hours at his apartment—a lesson in organized confusion. A queen-size mattress was jammed into one corner, crates of records spilled over the floor, and a banquet table buckled under the weight of turntables, a mixer, an Akai MPC, and a sixteen-channel Mackie mixing desk. A studio apartment in every sense of the word.”
― Mark Ronson, Night People: How to Be a DJ in '90s New York City

“The drip from the bathroom faucet thundered through my skull. I turned on the radio, desperately hoping to break the spell. But the announcer’s voice—usually a harmless, chipper drone—now seethed with spite as he read the weather. Every sound around me twisted into a horrific fun house mirror version of itself. And I was trapped inside. Terrified, I got up and stumbled to my mother’s door. “Mummy,” I said, barely holding it together, “I think I’m having some sort of panic attack.” She appeared, half-asleep in her nightshirt. We weren’t a family for hugs, but her voice came soft: “It’s going to be okay.” Those five words of mother’s love made the terror start to drain. I stood for a moment in her gentle presence, and I headed back to bed. I had a few more of those episodes that spring, always in the quiet dark. Since childhood, the night meant good times, so long as it was full of loud music and people. Emptied of that, it showed another side—paranoia, anxiety, and a darkness that could swallow you whole. Something I never wanted to face again. That’s easy enough, I thought: Never be alone at night.”
― Mark Ronson, Night People: How to Be a DJ in '90s New York City

“Mark has three crates of vinyl records, each weighing around sixty pounds, that need to be moved from his apartment to the elevator. He can only carry one crate at a time, and the journey involves keeping both the apartment door and the elevator door open. If the apartment door closes, it will lock him out, leaving the remaining crates stranded. If the elevator door closes, the elevator will leave, and Mark will have to summon it again—hoping that his prized possessions aren’t swiped by another tenant. Solution: Mark hoists the first crate and carries it to the apartment door, wedging it in the doorway to keep it ajar. He returns to the apartment, lifts the second crate—which oddly feels heavier, though he knows it isn’t—and carries it to the elevator, using it to prop the elevator door open. Back in the apartment, Mark braces himself for the third crate, lifts, grunts, and shuffles it to the elevator, setting it down inside. He returns to the apartment door, retrieves the first crate, and carries it to the elevator. Now, for the final act: a precise kick to the crate propping the elevator door open. If his aim is true, it will slide inside the elevator. If not, his lumbar will pay the price. With all three crates secured in the elevator, Mark presses “Lobby,” catching his breath and trying not to think about the fact that he’s about to have to repeat this process in reverse. And into a taxi.”
― Mark Ronson, Night People: How to Be a DJ in '90s New York City

“It also taught me an invaluable New York lesson: the chicer the spot, the more bullshit the DJ setup. And Café Tabac was the chicest of all.”
― Mark Ronson, Night People: How to Be a DJ in '90s New York City

“centric evolution of where music and nightlife were headed, a lot of the normal people and the eccentrics and artists got squeezed out. No Supreme employee or Tommy Boy A&R was dropping two hundred dollars on a bottle of Grey Goose to get into a party. Still, outsiders were riveted by this new scene, where Jay-Z, Damon Dash, Puffy, Leo, and the SKE kids reshaped New York nightlife, with me as their DJ. I knew I’d really made my way into the larger culture when I saw myself in a Ben Stiller script. At the 1996 VH-1 Fashion Awards, Stiller and Drake Sather played male models in a popular sketch satirizing the pretensions of the downtown fashion world. When Stiller set out to expand the sketch into a feature film, I got a call to play myself in the opening scene, DJing at Life. The script went like this: I spin “Relax,” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, triggering several”
― Mark Ronson, Night People: How to Be a DJ in '90s New York City

“like Tunnel, Club USA, Webster Hall, and Limelight were still the beating heart of the city’s nightlife, and you saw all of New York. Their huge dance floors mixed rappers, plumbers, pop stars, suits, designers, artists, and registered nurses. It was a continuation of the downtown energy of the eighties—punk meeting rap, fashion colliding with breakdancing, everyone genuinely curious about each other’s worlds. By the late nineties, when the exclusivity of Moomba, Lot 61, and Life’s VIP room reigned supreme, this spirit was disappearing. Different scenes still mingled, but instead of wanting to understand each other’s art and fashion, people were more interested in figuring out how the other was getting money—and how to tap in. The SKE crew were good kids, true downtowners, obsessed with hip-hop and trying to get paid. They were building on Bill Spector’s blueprint: skaters, hustlers, designers, models, rappers mingling in the club. But in this money-”
― Mark Ronson, Night People: How to Be a DJ in '90s New York City

“By the 1990s, bottle service made its way to New York City. High-end lounges like Moomba, Spy Bar, and Life realized they could make a killing by charging patrons hundreds or even thousands of dollars for wildly marked-up bottles of champagne and vodka. Dance floors, once the focal point of a club, became less important than seating arrangements, and the culture shifted toward a static, hierarchical environment where social status and ostentation dictated the mood of the night.”
― Mark Ronson, Night People: How to Be a DJ in '90s New York City

“boy”—heir to a British subculture that emerged after World War II, born when American Forces Network and Radio Luxembourg introduced British ears to jazz, blues, and R&B. In the sixties, while the BBC droned on with stuffy in-house orchestras, my dad and his generation tuned into the Radio Caroline “pirate” radio station broadcasting illegally from ships in international waters. He’d hear Booker T. & the M.G.’s and race to the record store Friday with a hundred other teens, all desperate for a copy. Twenty years younger, Jules carried that torch as part of the “rare groove” generation. Instead of hunting Otis Redding, he searched for forgotten seventies gems by underappreciated American artists like Donald Byrd, Roy Ayers, and Lonnie Liston Smith, masters of deep grooves, jazzy”
― Mark Ronson, Night People: How to Be a DJ in '90s New York City