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From WHYY in Philadelphia, this is Fresh Air Weekend.
I'm Tanya Mosley.
Today, Scarlett Johansson and June Squibb, the two Academy Award-nominated actors, discuss their new film Eleanor the Great, Johansson's directorial debut.
It's about a woman who starts passing off her deceased friend's Holocaust survival story as her own.
Also Grammy-winning producer Mark Ronson, on his new memoir Night People a love letter to late-night New York City and how his early days spinning records shaped everything that came after.
He's 50 now and still DJing, but some things have definitely changed.
I used to be leaving the club and dialing the dealer on the way out of the club, and now I'm making an appointment with my acupuncturist online as I'm leaving the club because my back is just so jacked.
That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend.
This is Fresh Air Weekend.
I'm Tanya Mosley.
A 94-year-old woman, displaced and grieving the loss of her best friend and roommate, makes an audacious choice.
She begins telling her deceased friend's story of surviving the Holocaust as if it were her own.
It's deceptive and morally complicated.
But for Eleanor it's the first time in years she truly feels seen.
That's the premise of Eleanor the Great, a poignant and humorous film that moved first-time director Scarlett Johansson to tears when she initially read the script.
To honor the story's weight, she cast actual Holocaust survivors alongside her lead.
At the center is June Squibb, 94 years old and having the creative run of her life.
The Academy Award-nominated actor has worked for over six decades, but it wasn't until Nebraska in 2013 that she became a household name.
Now with Eleanor the Great.
Following her recent triumph in Thelma, she's starring yet again as the lead in a story that centers on the very real experiences of someone still navigating life in their 90s.
Johansson herself knows something about breaking barriers.
The two-time Oscar nominee has navigated the industry since she was a kid.
She's built a career that spans intimate dramas like Marriage Story and global blockbusters like The Avengers films.
And now she's directed a film that explores grief and forgiveness.
And who has the right to tell someone's story?
Scarlett Johansson and June Squibb, welcome to Fresh Air.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Well, June, you have this sharp wit in Eleanor the Great.
We have seen this in several of your roles.
But there is this mix of bite and charm, and I want to give listeners a sense of it.
I want to start with a scene from early in the film.
Eleanor your character and her best friend Bessie, played by Rita Zohar, are shopping for kosher pickles when a stock boy makes the mistake of saying he thinks that all pickles are basically the same.
And Eleanor basically lets him know what she thinks about that.
Excuse me.
Where are the clothes in Scotia?
They're supposed to be right here.
I guess we're out.
Hello.
Do you have in the back maybe?
Well, we have a bunch of other pickles right here.
And honestly, I think all pickles taste the same.
Excuse me?
Eleanor?
Lou?
Are you listening to this?
All pickles are the same.
I heard.
Hey, Charlie.
Nice name.
How long you been working here, Charlie?
I don't know.
Few weeks, that's cute.
Well, yesterday was delivery day and you know how.
I know that because we've been coming here every friday for the last 16 years.
Can you count to 16, charlie?
Well, here's what you're gonna do.
You're gonna go to the back bessie, point to the back so charlie doesn't get lost.
You're gonna turn left at the shampoo, go all the way down the aisle.
Now, I know it's complicated, Charlie, but stay with me and you'll find the pickles that my friend needs, okay?
Okay, go fetch.
That was my guest June Squibb in Eleanor the Great, directed by Scarlett Johansson.
June.
The scene is definitely funny, but there is something more going on here, because Eleanor is kind of asserting herself at the two of them being dismissed.
And it's something that plays throughout the entire film.
What drew you to this character?
I just felt she was such a human character and had so many feelings, and she kept revealing herself something new about her constantly in the script.
And all that was very attractive to me, and it was well-written.
So I just felt, yeah, I want to do this.
Is it true that you wrote Scarlett a letter once you signed on to this, asking her to be a part of it?
Yes, when Scarlett was interested in directing it and the producers asked me if I would write a letter and they were going to include it in the package of letters or whatever it was.
They were sending Scarlett to try to convince her to direct the film.
So I did.
I don't think I said too much in it.
I think probably something like, will you come and do the film?
And then June offered me a large cash sum, which I still have not yet received.
No, I didn't.
Maybe a mocha blend or something like that, but not money.
Scarlett, I mentioned that this script made you cry when you read it.
Do you remember that moment when you just knew you had to be a part of it?
Well, firstly, I had received the cover letter from June.
I didn't know anything about the script, only that June Squibb wanted to take on a leading role.
And what could it be at this stage in her career?
I mean, June said she turns a lot down.
I'm sure she must, because you know it's such a huge effort to commit to something like this for any actor.
And I was just very intrigued.
And it was clear to me...
Upon first reading it.
Okay, this is a character who suffers this devastating loss and she is having this very challenging time navigating this.
This move back to Manhattan after 40 years of not living there and she's a 94-year-old woman who feels, you know, invisible in the current, you know economy, environment.
And you know then, all of a sudden, this plot twist, you know, which you described earlier, this lie that Eleanor tells you know in a moment of, I think, real deep loneliness and isolation, an attempt to connect with a community.
And what grows out of that lie was so unexpected.
It just felt very surprising.
And it's rare to feel surprised when you read a script.
A lot of times scripts are very formulaic, or they're based on, you know, IP that you're familiar with, or You know you can kind of see where the story is going.
But this one just felt really original and unique.
When you took on the challenge, you're like, OK, this is so interesting.
I'm going to do this.
How did you wrestle with those moral questions as a director, making it funny because it is very humorous, but also taking on such a heavy topic?
Yeah.
Well, I mean, the humor certainly was written in Tori Kamen, who wrote the script.
You know, it was a sort of thesis that she built around her grandmother, who she was very, very close with, who similarly moved back to New York after many decades of living away.
You know, as a much older woman.
And those very biting lines, those salty lines, even from Rita's character Bessie are.
Some of them are verbatim.
And so I grew up in New York.
I, you know, had a...
Jewish grandmother and who was also could be very dry and she was very funny.
And I don't know, that humor felt familiar to me.
It was like dialogue, vocabulary that I just got.
And so that was baked in.
And, of course, having June with her incredible comedic timing and her expression and her And you know she's the perfect person to be delivering those zingers.
But as far as the sensitive, you know, balance and subject matter, you know, I think as a director yeah.
And I think even as an actor too, it's not really my job to kind of judge these characters and what they do.
Or if I have any judgment, I'm probably not the right person to be supporting the story.
I think it's you know.
I hope that the audience if I do my job right by the end of the film— is able to abandon any judgment and have empathy and compassion for the characters, and certainly for Eleanor's deception, and understand why she does what she does.
Scarlett, you made this intentional choice to cast real Holocaust survivors in the group support scenes.
How did that idea come together?
I think it was pretty obvious that that was necessary, because when you start to talk about casting people for it, it just felt kind of like a phony.
I wouldn't even know what I would be looking for exactly.
It just felt very important and a must, an absolute must, that we identify survivors that wanted to participate and then were able to participate.
And, you know, can we create an environment where...
You know, those people could sit with us for a couple of days and not, you know, in general comfort.
You know, luckily living in New York, you know there was a lot of different roads that we could kind of go down.
Jessica Hecht, who's a fantastic actor and extraordinary in the film, who plays Lisa, Eleanor's daughter.
She is very involved in the Jewish community here in New York.
And so she was able to identify a couple of our survivors just through the community.
And also we, you know, we worked with Road of Shalom, the temple that we shot the film actually, where Eleanor's character is bat mitzvahed.
They helped us to identify some people.
The Shoah Foundation also helped us out.
So, yeah, we just kind of sent out the –
That signal.
And we were very, very fortunate to be able to come up with a group that we did.
And tomorrow we'll be having our screening in New York.
And yeah, we'll be inviting our group to come and enjoy the film with their family.
I'm so excited for them to see it.
Because that population is dwindling.
There are not many.
Very fast, the population is dwindling.
I think it's also why we must keep the story.
We must do it, which is what I think Scarlett and I did with this.
I mean, we make people look at it and remember and understand.
Scarlett mentioned that there was a planned bat mitzvah for you in the film.
You actually had to learn Torah for this role.
Yes, I did.
And I did.
It's a sore subject.
Because it didn't end up in the film.
June was dreaming her Torah portion.
I was.
And then we ended up cutting it.
And she was so bummed.
You can hear the bitterness in her voice.
You can.
But it didn't make it in the film.
You've got to find a way to have that out there as an extra.
Well, Scarlett says eventually it will get out.
It's going to be on the B-sides.
Yeah.
June, as someone, you converted to Judaism decades ago.
Is that right?
In the 50s.
In the 50s.
You married someone who was Jewish.
That's why.
Mm-hmm.
What was that experience like diving deeper into that story, into those texts for Eleanor's journey?
It's also, I would imagine, personal growth.
It was and I kept thinking back.
You know, if I was sitting studying it or something and I would think back to that time when I was studying Judaism with this wonderful young rabbi in Cleveland Cleveland, Ohio.
Where are you from?
It was very exciting.
I loved it.
I loved doing it.
And I loved meeting him and becoming close to him.
And we just talked about everything.
He was just a great, great guy.
And he married us.
And my husband said he married me.
He didn't marry him at all.
But it was a very exciting and wonderful part of my life.
It really was.
Scarlett, you discovered not too long ago that you had family lost in the Holocaust.
Is that right?
I did, actually.
I was on the Henry Louis Gates show Finding Your Roots and I knew that I had lost relatives in the Warsaw ghetto.
But I certainly didn't know how many.
And looking at the register, one of the members who had escaped went back, you know, after the war and after the ghetto had been destroyed.
Yeah.
And...
You know, had to go back and to kind of take a notice of.
You know, this is what they died from, this is how old they were.
You know, almost like a diary of that.
And so to see the handwritten names ages.
I know children.
You know that they were dying of cancer.
You know it was listed either starvation or, you know diarrhea, or it's so profound and moving and horrifying just to hold that document.
Yeah.
Yeah it's, and you know, I've spoken to friends of mine to actually, who have very similar stories of members of their family that they lost in the Holocaust, meaning similar in the sense that the details were kind of lost for decades.
And that actually, that my you know friends of mine that are at the same generation as myself were uncovering the secrets of the past.
I think because there's.
So you know, one of the interesting things I think about Bessie's story is that she says you know, I've not told anyone, not even my own children.
And I think a lot of survivors live, you know, holding those stories like a horror.
They don't want to recount or relive.
And so there's a lot of these stories that are still have not been uncovered and, you know, are kind of lost in time.
And so if you have a living relative who's lived through the Holocaust, you know to be able to.
I mean, the work that the Shoah Foundation does to preserve those stories is so vital.
It's so important, especially because the population is dwindling rapidly.
You mentioned earlier your grandmother.
And I wondered if you had had a chance to talk with your grandparents about what you had discovered before they passed away.
No, I never did.
I think it would have been very, very painful.
The relatives of mine that were lost in the Holocaust were actually on my maternal side.
My mom's father, his family was from right outside of Warsaw.
And again, I mean, he was...
I think, very removed from that part of his family.
It was almost like a shame nobody talked about.
Like, don't look back.
He would have been devastated to have seen those papers, I'm sure.
Let's take a short break.
If you're just joining us.
We're talking with actress June Squibb, who stars in the new film Eleanor the Great, and Scarlett Johansson, who makes her directorial debut with the movie.
We'll continue our conversation after a short break.
This is Fresh Air Weekend.
I want to talk a little bit about your career, June.
I've heard you say that you knew you wanted to be an actor from the moment you left the womb.
And I was just wondering what kind of career did you envision for yourself?
I think I always thought more I would be on stage.
I never thought about film or television as a career.
I don't know why.
But my early career was the theater, of course, and so that just seemed what it would be.
Your Broadway debut was in the musical Gypsy in 1959.
You developed this nickname, the dirtiest mouth on Broadway?
Yes, because I had a dirty mouth.
Okay, paint a picture for us.
Of course, this is NPR, so you can't use all the words.
No, I won't go into it, but I was very quick with the curse words.
And I looked about 12.
I think I was in my 20s. when all that happened, 20s or early 30s.
And I looked so young.
And so it was like, what?
What does she say?
But I had a dirty mouth.
There's no other way to describe it.
Tell me about your path into comedy.
When you stepped into theater, were you always taking on these kind of roles, or how did you find that voice, that comedic side of you?
It was the Cleveland Playhouse.
That's where I was before I came to New York.
And I went in as a student, and I ended up on staff, and I was there for five years in all.
And that's where I started.
I had always danced, but I started singing there.
And they put me into almost every musical as the comedian.
And so when I went to New York, I went with a group of people from there.
And it was just like everybody assumed this is what I was going to do.
And this is what I ended up doing for about 20 years.
Scarlett, you mentioned that you grew up in New York and your grandmother also lived there, too.
Can you talk about your grandmother and the time that you spent with her as a kid and maybe how that informed you directing this movie?
Oh, I was very close with my grandmother, Dorothy.
She was a... you know, fiercely independent woman.
She lived independently for forever.
She was like a safe haven for me.
I would escape to her apartment in Hell's Kitchen most weekends.
You know, she introduced me to all the free arts in the city.
We would see jazz in Lincoln Center and we would go to the Tisch School and see plays and young playwrights.
And You know I got so much out of my friendship with my grandmother and she just enjoyed me tremendously.
And we would talk about everything, you know, everything.
We'd talk about the family dynamics.
We would talk.
You know, later on, when I was older, I would talk to her about marriage.
You know boyfriends sex, our bodies.
You know her experience aging, what she was experiencing physically politics, all kinds of stuff.
You know, we had such a profoundly special, deep friendship.
You know, and I think that our friendship really, when I read the script of Eleanor the Great, I was very moved by the friendship between Nina and Eleanor because it did remind me very much of the dynamic I had with my grandmother and the ease we felt in one another's company.
Scarlett Johansson and June Squibb, thank you so much for this film and this conversation.
Thank you.
Scarlett Johansson and June Squibb's new film is Eleanor the Great.
Music producer and DJ Mark Ronson's new memoir Night People takes us back to a New York that no longer exists before Mayor Rudy Giuliani's crackdown on nightlife, before camera phones and bottle service transform the culture forever.
It's a story of how a young outsider with a British accent found a place in the 1990s club scene, learning to read crowds, dig through crates and create the perfect mix of venues where the city's tribes collided.
Rappers and models, skaters and socialites, everyone glamorous and a little lawless.
Night people, as he defines them, are different than people who simply enjoy a night out.
They become their best selves once the sun goes down, and daytime is just the warm-up.
Those formative years spinning records would shape everything that came after.
Ronson is a nine-time Grammy winner, producing career-defining albums for Amy Winehouse and Lady Gaga.
He's also behind hits like Uptown Funk with Bruno Mars, Shallow from A Star is Born and the Barbie soundtrack.
Mark Ronson, welcome back to Fresh Air.
Thank you so much.
Thank you, Tanya.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah, you know Mark, this was a really fun read and it had me thinking that most of us experience the DJ from the dance floor.
So this book really gives us a glimpse of what it's actually like for the DJ.
You're able to just make the room explode by the decisions that you make.
And you describe in this book how nothing compares to the first time you feel it.
Take me back to the actual first time you actually experienced that rush.
Yeah.
So the first time I had that feeling, I was at my mother's wedding to my stepfather.
And I think I was 10 years old.
And they had like a really small little wedding in the garden at this summer rental.
And even though my stepdad was this really successful, huge rock star he was in the band Foreigner and wrote all these songs.
I Want to Know What Love Is Waiting for a Girl Like You.
It seemed like the music at the wedding was almost an afterthought.
I think they were playing a tape deck in the house that was wired to some speakers in the garden.
And then one point, as the sun was going down, the music just kind of stopped entirely.
You heard the cassette kind of snap.
And Mick just looked at me and he was like, Ma, go put something on.
And you know, obviously this felt like all the responsibility of the world in my hands, like this little kid obsessed with music, like my stepdad saying like you can control the music you know, like at this wedding.
So I ran in the house and there were all these cassettes on the floor.
And I remember, like, searching through them and there was nothing that seemed right.
And then I saw timepiece is the best of eric clapton and i was like ah, and even in my like 10 year old brain i saw the song wonderful tonight on there and i was like that is an appropriate song for now.
That is like my mom.
My mom is looks wonderful in her dress and it seems romantic and i'm going to put that on.
I quickly queued it up, hit they you know, had some crazy 80s cassette deck with an auto cue and found the song hit play.
And I remember standing inside the house looking through the window as my stepdad pulls my mom in for like a slow dance and the moon.
And you know I even say in the book.
My memory here is blurry and it might be a little Hollywooded out.
But it was like he brought her in.
She's luminescent in this dress.
And I just stood there watching this scene, slightly drunk off, this feeling of like oh my God, you know, this is my music forever playing out there.
But also it was this thing.
It was like the first time in my life I genuinely have a memory of having done something right.
So, you know, obviously at that moment that wasn't like my Spider-Man Genesis story.
It wasn't something like, ah, now I'm going to be a DJ.
I didn't even put this together, probably until I was writing the book, but it really is one of my most sort of visceral early childhood memories.
Well, you make this distinction between people who enjoy a night out and night people, people who kind of just become their best selves once the sun goes down.
And when did you realize that you were also a night person?
Well, I think it's one of those things.
You know, when I was 18, starting out as a DJ in clubs in New York, music was just my passion.
So I'm chasing this thing at night because if you're a DJ, obviously you work at night.
But then, as I was writing the book and I started to piece together like wait, this really tight-knit crew of maybe 200 people that we saw all the time, that were all a little broken in their own way, or maybe.
It's too much of a generalization to say everybody was like, you know, falling apart or a vampire.
But there was this thing that just the people that I saw out night after night were people that the daytime was just like a little too like the bright light of day.
It was like too much for people.
Maybe they were running from something, running towards something, looking for community.
So I realized you know, I came up with the term night people because I thought that applied to our little cracked community of people.
You also were raised by night people.
You mentioned your mom.
You mentioned your stepdad, Mick Jones.
He would actually wake you up in the middle of the night on school nights and I think you were in middle school to get your opinion on foreigner mixes.
Yeah.
What do you remember most about those nights?
I just remember thinking it was so cool that he valued my opinion.
I was so obsessed with music, and he had a home studio.
And the idea of being in his home studio watching him craft these demos and trying to learn how to work these tape machines and stuff was so cool.
His home studio was my favorite room in the house.
I mean, I've so valued my time spent alone with him because he was out of the house and on tour a lot and I was so close to him but also feeling like my opinion meant anything, really meant the world to me.
Mark, I mean, it's your life, so it's normal for you.
But I think for any foreigner fan, or even those who just are aware of foreigner, to hear that you were in the room as he was going through these mixes, some of them went on to be very popular songs, iconic songs.
Are there things that you remember where you were listening to those beginning, like the beginning stages of music that would become the tapestry of our lives?
Yeah.
I don't remember specific songs, but I think it was the first time that he brought a mix home and played it for me.
And then he played me a mix of the same song a week later.
And I said, I kind of like the other one.
I was nine years old, squeaky English accent.
I kind of like the other one because the bass was a bit louder.
And he was just like, what?
And then he checked with the engineer, was the bass louder?
And I think after that he realized I had these sort of like bizarre like recall for these things.
I think he started to value my opinion.
But no, it is crazy to think that i was listening to as he was like i want to know what love is in these songs that would become classics.
Like i i can't tell you how much of my you know opinion actually went into the final product, but it was so, it was so important to me.
I really can't get over that.
He wrote i want to know what love is about your mother, I know.
And no, that's insane.
And then also the song that he wrote Waiting for a Girl Like You before he tried to convince my mom that he wrote it for her too.
And she was like, not having it.
She's like, but you wrote that four years before you met me.
But he was like, but I was waiting for a girl like you.
I think he was just trying to be romantic or something.
But yeah, she wasn't having it.
Let's take a short break.
If you're just joining us.
We're talking with Mark Ronson about his new memoir Night People, which chronicles his formative years as a DJ in 1990s New York City.
We'll continue our conversation after a short break.
I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air Weekend.
You paint this vivid picture.
But I want to go a little bit deeper into the sheer physicality of your job, because I would just guess that New York City is not for the faint of heart for DJs, because today you just have kind of like a computer or a thumb drive with your music.
But back then you had to lug these big crates of records through the city to play gigs.
How many crates on average would you take to a gig?
Would you jump in a cab?
Would you be on a subway?
Would you be climbing up stairs?
Oh, my God.
I mean, all of it.
I mean.
So the standard that I would take on any given night was probably three crates with 100 records each, and maybe like a giant bursting bag, because you're taking old school disco and classics, old school hip hop, new school hip hop RB reggae, a little bit of house music.
So if you're doing a four or five-hour set, which is what we're doing most nights, that's what you're bringing.
So if I was playing a cool club, I had a bunch of friends with me.
Everybody wants to get in, get some drink tickets.
If I was playing a not-so-cool club like playing one of my uptown pay-the-bills gigs at a bar on the Upper East Side nobody was coming with me.
And those were the nights when I kind of write about it.
Sometimes leaving my apartment would be like That riddle of the teacher in school, the fox, the farmer and the bag of grain and the fox and the chicken and the farmer has to take them across the thing.
So I had three crates and put one in my front door to keep the door open.
Call the elevator, put one in the elevator to keep the elevator door open.
Go back for the third one that was in the apartment, put that in the elevator, pick up the one that was in my apartment door, bring that over on the way and kick the one that's holding the elevator door open.
All the way downstairs, I'm already breaking a sweat.
And then repeat the whole thing in reverse.
And that was like in the apartment.
That was only one building where I ever had an elevator.
The rest of it were like four or five-story walk-ups.
So you were really like yeah, you had broken a sweat before you were even in the cab on the way to the club.
But I was 22.
My back could take it.
It's a little bit different now.
Yeah, what's your back like today?
Yeah.
Yeah, it's not very grateful to that 22-year-old DJ.
I have, like you know listen, it's not like maybe being a chef or another intense line of thing where you're just like covered in cuts, bruises and calluses.
But I still have, I only found out two years ago that I have this crazy arthritis in my right foot.
From 25 years.
The doctor, when I went in, he was like, oh, I watched a YouTube video of you.
I noticed you kind of like really aggressively tap your foot while you're DJing.
And I had never thought about this because you're just tapping to the beat.
He's like, yeah, that happens to musicians in the fill.
Like even just tapping your foot for 30 years at the thing.
So I named it DJ foot because I just like want it to be like my own.
But no, it's... And then...
I'm not proud of any of this, but terrible tinnitus.
My back is completely messed up from 25 years of headphones on.
You've got your neck crooked to one side.
Which looked kind of cool.
That always is kind of the stance.
It's the stance.
It looks cool, but it's not great for you.
Is there something you miss about it, though?
I mean, it's much easier now you've just got your computer in front of you, I would guess.
Yeah.
You know, in the book, I wanted to keep it as diaristically and just really only in the 90s.
And it's really only in the epilogue where I'm walking around downtown with my daughter strapped to me and the baby beyond, seeing the clubs and talking about what it was like then versus now with the laptop, versus the hundreds of records, and a good friend of mine read the book and he said he said I really like the book.
He goes, it just sounds like you really miss playing vinyl, so you should just only play vinyl till the end of the year, and I don't know why.
I was just like okay, so I just I started to play records again and been playing out in clubs in Brooklyn and downtown and It really has been this joyous restart of my love for DJing.
So I'm very grateful to it in some ways.
But in other ways, carrying those records around is insane.
Going down into a basement and coming back up.
I hope this is okay.
I used to be leaving the club and dialing the dealer on the way out of the club.
And now I'm making an appointment with my acupuncturist online as I'm leaving the club.
Because my back is just so...
But it's been incredible playing vinyl again, actually.
I didn't realize how much I had missed that process.
I want to talk a little bit about that power and control that you have to move people.
There's this night you describe where you made people go literally nuts.
It was at a club called Sweet Thang.
Can I have you read?
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
One night, around 1 a.m., I dropped a new cut called Deja Vu, Uptown Baby.
Only a few weeks old, its hometown pride refrain had already taken over every club and radio station in NYC.
When the chorus hit, as the crowd chanted 'Uptown Baby, Uptown Baby, we gets down baby'?
Loud enough to be heard five blocks away.
I ducked the volume and dropped the instrumental of Busta Rhymes' Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Could See on beat under their voices, remixing the room itself.
There was a half-second delay as their brains processed what just happened, and then they ignited like an energy rocket from floor to ceiling.
For eight bars, it felt like we'd all leapt into another dimension.
OK, so in that moment, when there's that half second delay for everybody's brains to process what just happened, that must have felt like an eternity.
What does that feel like up there where you're taking a chance and trying something new?
You're not sure if the crowd is actually going to respond to it.
It's such a visceral memory of all the times because there were thousands of times that I would do that.
You would drop the volume so the whole crowd is chanting, uptown, baby, uptown, baby.
And as they're chanting, that's all they're thinking about.
You drop it.
The bus rhymes, the instrumentals.
So they're still chanting.
There's a split second where they have to realize, oh my God, he's dropping this other song that we love even more as we're singing under it.
So you are literally remixing the room.
Whenever you do one of those mixes we used to call them wordplay mixes where you go from the line in one song.
There's a line in Snoop's Gin and Juice where we got and they ain't leaving till six in the morning.
And then on six in the morning, you go right into Nas, Uchiwale, because he's referenced that song.
So they ain't leaving till six in the morning is now Nas.
So you've just done this slick on-beat transition from Snoop to Nas.
And of course, it takes a half second for the brain to realize, but it's still on-beat.
And you just get this crazy blowback, this charge from the crowd all going like oh at the same time.
They call it the scream, the chant, whatever it is.
And it's like clay or Play-Doh.
The whole crowd is this thing that you're able to mold together.
It's incredible.
It's kind of why I can't stop DJing.
It's still a feeling that I only get from this one thing, no matter what else I do in my work as a producer.
Okay Mark, so the crowds that you're playing for?
In the early and mid-90s it was such a blend, as you say hip-hop heads and fashion kids and artists.
But you also write about...
Being Jewish in hip hop, often one of the few white faces, and having advantages that most DJs didn't with your family, money and your connections.
And I'm wondering how did you balance being an outsider who, on one hand, you needed to prove yourself, with being an insider who already had, like certain, doors open?
Yes.
You know she was out in the parties, out in the scene in New York, sort of amazing rock and roll artist mom.
Yeah.
I was horribly embarrassed of all of it, but it's probably more in a teenage way when you're just like, oh mom, do you have to come to the club when I'm DJing?
Meanwhile everybody thought it was the coolest thing that my mom came to these hole-in-the-wall basements and clubs.
But yes, I think, in a kind of immature way I thought that that would make me quote-unquote other in this scene where really the scene was just about showing improving.
I remember Funkmaster Flex in an early article in the New York Times and it was like I just remember being like this is the nicest thing anyone's ever said about me.
It's like he knows it doesn't matter who his family is, where he's from, he knows how to rock a room like blah blah, blah.
And that was, like you know, obviously Flex at the time was the absolute biggest figure in New York hip-hop.
But yes, I did have advantages that other people didn't really didn't have.
Of course, my mom bought me the turntables for graduation.
I had a stepdad who was a musician who nurtured, like you know, my musical, what I wanted to do as a kid.
So I had to really deal with that and address that really out in the open in the book, because of course I had advantages and stuff like that.
But I also, you know, worked my ass off and that's kind of like the two sides of the book.
It also sounded like something you did and stick with me here like it sounds like maybe that tension also pushed you to find your own lane to do something different.
I actually think I want to reference the ACDC Back in Black moment.
You talk about this moment where you took some risks, where you brought in other types of music, not just old samples but also like rock music.
That actually helped you develop your signature offering.
And to do this, I want to actually play a little bit of Back in Black, so we remember what that sounded like.
Let's listen.
Back in Black, Back in Black, Back in Black, Back in Black, Back in Black.
That was ACDC's classic Back in Black.
And Mark, you tell this story of how you took this gamble to smuggle this song into what you call the hottest hip-hop party on the East Coast.
What did you do with it and how did you know it would work?
Well, I absolutely didn't know it would work.
So obviously just listening to that song now it's like anybody with a pulse knows it's pretty undeniable, that record.
It had been sampled by Rick Rubin for the BC Boys.
KRS had sampled it for Boogie Down Production.
It wasn't completely foreign to hip-hop, but nobody played that record in the clubs at that time.
I was at this club called Spy Bar one night, which was one of the first super trendy exclusive, ultra VIP lounges.
I remember being at the door sometimes and watching Trump get turned away.
It was this place, Leonardo DiCaprio, whatever, the 90s.
It was the place everybody wanted to be.
The DJs there played a lot of rock and roll.
Half of the time I tried to get in and I couldn't get in.
But one night I'm in there and And they play the song and everybody just starts going crazy and dancing on the couches like it's the fall of Rome.
And I just remember being hit by how powerful that record was.
And this was a crowd that was dancing.
It was very unlike the crowds that I DJed for.
But I remember starting to think God, I really want to play this at Cheetah, which was the big party on the Monday night, which is where Mike Tyson and Janet Jackson and Missy Elliott—it really was the place—.
So I worked out this mix all week where I could play The Benjamins by Lil' Kim and Puff Daddy, which was the biggest song of the time, and go into this rock and roll remix as a transition of that song and then write on the one as soon as Biggie's verse ended.
Play Back in Black.
Obviously, it was the kind of club that if I played and fallen on my face...
It's the kind of place something could get, a bottle could be thrown at the booth.
Like you don't really know.
Like it wasn't a place where you really wanted to mess around too much.
So I played the thing and I dropped the record and it's a split second where it's like the crowd is just kind of like huh.
But it's on beat, everybody's still dancing and there's no chance to kind of be too judgmental when your body's still moving right.
And it feels good.
And by the second time the riff came around, the club just kind of erupted.
Like there was this incredible feeling like the crowd, like just everyone, knowing they were doing something they kind of weren't supposed to be doing.
Like this song that we weren't supposed to be hearing at Cheetah.
I was supposed to be playing it.
They weren't supposed to be dancing to it.
And it was just this great moment and from that moment on it did free me up and made me a little more brave.
And it's funny because you know the mashup era came quite soon after, so it's almost a little ho-hum to think of, like playing back and back in a club.
Like, of course, why not?
But at that moment, there was nothing like it, but it did help me find my own sound and identity.
And that's kind of when I really started to, I guess, get like crazy gigs and offers because I was doing something that nobody else was doing.
What are some of the biggest DJing sins in your opinion?
I'll just say like I hate when a DJ does that – plays that horn like – Oh, really?
It's like – The air horn.
Oh, my God.
The klaxon.
Yes, there's something about that that's sort of like it's a little bit like –
An extra explosion in a film, right?
It's kind of like all right, if you're not making me feel it enough with the music.
I don't need the horns to be bullied into having a visceral emotion to this music.
But I also kind of like the air horn.
I mean, there's something about it that feels very New York radio.
Yeah, yeah.
The other ones are like, and I sort of talk about them because, you know, the book, I said how to be a DJ in 90s New York City is the title because it's a little bit tongue in cheek.
No one's ever going to be a DJ in 90s New York City.
So, but there are a lot of things in this book that I feel like at any era might be sort of like help out.
So there's things like back in that era my era it was a cardinal sin to really play a record more than once in the night, like if there was a huge hit to play it five times throughout the night.
It was like this thing like oh, you're not good enough to like to to rock a night with only playing the big records.
Once there was a bit of that sense, there was this thing like never play all the big records when you're the opener.
In fact, you don't play any big records when you're the opener.
Like radio hits.
Yeah, any of the big club records.
I remember opening for Funkmaster Flex and being so nervous to play anything.
I didn't play anything from literally the past seven years or something.
And then the idea of playing huge records to an empty room, trying to ignite a room before it's ready.
Before the room is ready.
So timing just is such a thing.
Like you have to know it.
You have to be so attuned, which means you kind of have to be attuned to human behavior.
And it's a sense.
Is it something that can be taught?
I mean, that's why they call it, you know, the expression reading a room.
Like it's like I don't know if it literally goes back to DJing, but it's like reading the floor, reading the room, reading the dance floor.
It's like, there's so much of it that's just, yes, it's the interplay between you and the crowd.
You could be in the best place. nightclub in the world with the best sound system.
It doesn't matter if the crowd isn't with you and you don't have a relationship with them.
That's what it all comes down to, certainly for a great night.
Mark Ronson, it's such a pleasure to talk to you, and thank you so much for this fun read.
Thank you so much.
Mark Ronson's new memoir about DJing in the 90s New York club scene is called Night People.
Fresh Air Weekend is produced by Teresa Madden.
Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller.
With Terry Gross, I'm Tanya Mosley.
