You can argue that having worked with Amy Winehouse on Back To Black, Lady Gaga on “Shallow,” Bruno Mars on “Uptown Funk,” Barbie the Album and more, British producer/artist Mark Ronson is, in fact, the most influential musician of the 21st century.
He is definitely in the discussion. However, before he was helping craft the soundtrack to this century, he was a devout music fan discovering his musical voice and style as a DJ in the New York scene.
That is the tale he tells in his superb new memoir, Night People: How To Be A DJ In ‘90s New York City. A love letter to hip hop, New York City, the clubs like Limelight that defined the time, and music, Night People is sensational both as a personal narrative and a snapshot of a period and a culture.
I spoke to Ronson about writing and why there won’t be a quick sequel.
Steve Baltin: When I ran into you at the Chateau a couple of years ago you were working on the book. I think at the time said, you were taking a little break from music with the baby on the way.
Mark Ronson: Yeah, I’ve been working on this book. I went back and looked when I was first sending my editor some chapters, and I noticed it was like March of ‘22 so I have been working on this book for quite a while. I took probably a year out when we were doing the score and the music for Barbie, but for the most part this has been the most major undertaking I’ve had in the last three years. Of course there are times during it, especially towards the end, I was like, “Why the hell am I doing this? At least when I’m working on music not every song I think is great ends up being a hit, but I can pretty much tell early on if it’s time to chuck it in the trash.” Whereas this book I’d never done anything like it, so I was like, “What if this isn’t any good? And at this point, now I put in tens of thousands of hours.” But there was a reason I had to write it. And now that it’s done, I am really psyched about it.
Baltin: Did you ever read Flea’s memoir?
Ronson: Yeah, I haven’t read it in a while, but it’s great.
Baltin: If you remember that book ends right at the beginning of The Chili Peppers. And he originally planned to write a second one. I asked him after if he was still going to write a second one and he definitely was no longer sure about it. A book is such a different undertaking. I suppose the equivalent would be a box set.
Ronson: I don’t know if anyone ever makes a box set. A box set is usually like a retrospective of your career. My favorite box set growing up was the Led Zeppelin one. And I doubt that took Jimmy Page more than 40 hours to just like go in and check that the remasters were good. In a similar way, my book ends in 2000, so it’s before meeting Amy, it’s before Bruno, it’s before Gaga, all these things that people might genuinely be curious about, as these people have millions and millions of fans. But yes, one or two people have since then gone like, “Oh, so does that mean there’s going to be a book about this thing?” And I was like, “Not for 20 years at least.” This just took so much out of me. I loved it and I reconnected with hundreds of people interviewing them to really paint the most vivid picture of the Nineties in the scene and the club life. But it was all consuming. I don’t know if I’d go back into that again.
Baltin: You joke it would be 20 years at least. This is now 30 years out. It would probably take you 20 years to have the perspective to understand what happened with Amy and Gaga and that era of your career right now. I imagine looking back at everything, things in the Nineties changed so much for you, looking at it now with the perspective of two kids and being a Grammy winning producer.
Ronson: Yeah, definitely. Part of the reason I started writing the book when I did was because I started thinking pretty soon these memories are really going to start evaporating from my brain. We have such a digital trail of things that we’ve done, even if you don’t keep a diary, you can look back at your digital calendar from 2003, and that’s going to have 100 prompts for you to remember stuff. I had nothing like that back then, so that’s why I did dig so deep for a lot of these memories. In this book it’s not just about DJing in the clouds, it’s about my lifestyle at that time and there’s addiction and compulsion and things like that. Yes, I wouldn’t have had that perspective on all that until really recently. But just how much this took over my life I don’t know if I’d be ready to do that again.
Baltin: For you, what was some of the music that really changed the most?
Ronson: I think that I was always aware of the heavy political message of a lot of hip hop. I was aware that as a white kid, coming from a privileged upbringing on the Upper West Side and whatever I wasn’t ever going to fully get all of what hip hop had to offer because that message was speaking to someone’s struggle that was not me and I would never fully be able to identify with it. But I still loved the music, and I still played it and I was accepted in this scene. I think that the way some of the music’s changed now is really remarkable because part of what’s happened in the wake of finishing the book is I’ve just gone back to playing vinyl again. I haven’t played vinyl in 20 years and at the end of the book I talk a little bit about the difference between playing digitally and why I was such a better DJ in the Nineties is I would spend hours on the floor of my apartment putting together my set for the night because I couldn’t just walk up to the club with a USB or a laptop with 10,000 songs on it. You really had to think about what you were bringing, and I didn’t have anything like Kid Capri and how he had eight dudes to carry his records to the club. It was just me and a friend. So, I think about how I was much more of a thoughtful DJ back then. So, now going to the club with records playing, playing for kids that were not alive when some of these songs came out and watching a really great young DJ like Cosmo play this music from the same era with her own slant on it. It’s amazing to see what songs have held up, what songs carry the message, and what songs are even more meaningful maybe now than they were then. But that’s the beauty of music. To play a song like “93 Till Infinity” by Souls of Mischief and still to see it emotionally overtake a crowd of people even now is part of the joy of why I do it.
Baltin: The other thing that I love about writing is it teaches you things that you have no idea you’re thinking about. Most good writing is subconscious. I imagine in writing this book, there was a ton of stuff that you realize that you hadn’t thought about in a very long time.
Ronson: Yeah, and I didn’t really set out to write a very personal book. I thought, “I’m going to write about DJs and clubs.” And of course, the book’s called Night People, and it touches on why we all go out. For some people, it’s to get laid. Some people love to dance. Some people just want to commune with people. And some people are just a little cracked and would rather live their life at night. I had all of those things. So, I realized, at one point my wife said to me at the end when she read the book like, “Oh, it’s funny because there was obviously some reason that you wrote this very personal exposing book.” Because I had to go into my own demons and addictions and things like that to paint the whole story. It’s not the majority of the book, but it had to be in there. So, I think that it was very exposing. I was 46 when I started, 49 when I finished it. As somebody who’s still obviously figuring it out but has been through a couple years of therapy and recognizes some of those compulsions, I had to put that through that lens or it would have been a little boring or not true.