ISSUE-10

DAILY NOTE
pOsT-mAmbO NEw YOrk
AND ThE sALsA bOOm
THURSDAY, MAY 9, 2013
10 Of
22
shArON whITE, sAINT Dj / ruN-Dmc / fOur TET's LIvE TIps

THE DAILY NOTE LAST NIGHT
Despite its epic history, New York city can
sometimes feel like a place with no memory.
buildings go up and are torn down in the blink
of an eye. Your favorite cafe might disappear
overnight. bands, Djs, and parties quickly
become the toast of the town only to be
forgotten a few months later. Neighborhoods
completely transform in the span of a few
years. New Yorkers themselves are gripped
by a preoccupation with what’s new, what’s
fashionable, and what’s next. Granted, this
inexhaustible thirst for renewal is a big part
of what makes New York, well... New York.
It also means that fascinating pieces of the
city’s legacy often fall by the wayside, its
stories existing only in the memories of
those who actually lived them. A key tenet of
what we’re doing at Daily Note is unearthing
these musical tales, and that aim is especially
strong in today’s issue. The cover feature
details the birth of salsa, a rhythm with cuban
and puerto rican roots that found its legs in
’70s New York before it was marketed to the
world. Our Q&A finds pioneering Dj sharon
white reminiscing about the emotion and
decadence of the city’s early ’80s club culture,
while writer hua hsu recalls how the nowdefunct
weekend records mapped his New
York experience. The stories are out there—it’s
simply a matter of tracing the lines.
ABOUT RED BULL MUSIc AcADEMY
The Red Bull Music Academy celebrates creative pioneers
and presents fearless new talent. Now we’re in New York
City.
The Red Bull Music Academy is a world-traveling
series of music workshops and festivals: a platform for
those who make a difference in today’s musical landscape.
This year we’re bringing together two groups of selected
participants — producers, vocalists, DJs, instrumentalists
and musical mavericks from around the world — in New York
City. For two weeks, each group will hear lectures by
musical luminaries, work together on tracks, and perform
in the city’s best clubs and music halls. Imagine a place
MASTHEAD
Editor in Chief Piotr Orlov
Copy Chief Jane Lerner
Senior Editor Sam Hockley-Smith
Senior Writer/Editor Vivian Host
Contributing Editor Shawn Reynaldo
Staff Writer Olivia Graham
Editorial Coordinator Alex Naidus
2
Creative Director Justin Thomas Kay
for Doubleday & Cartwright
Art Director Christopher Sabatini
Production Designer Suzan Choy
Photo Editor Lorenna Gomez-Sanchez
Staff Photographer Anthony Blasko
All-Seeing Eye Torsten Schmidt
The content of Daily Note does not necessarily represent the opinions of
Red Bull or Doubleday & Cartwright.
that’s equal parts science lab, the Hanging Gardens
of Babylon, and Kraftwerk’s home studio. Throw in a
touch of downtown New York circa 1981, a sprinkle of
Prince Jammy’s mixing board, and Bob Moog’s synthesizer
collection all in a 22nd-century remix and you’re
halfway there.
The Academy began back in 1998 and has been traversing
the globe since, traveling to Berlin, Cape Town, São
Paulo, Barcelona, London, Toronto, and many other places.
Interested? Applications for the 2014 Red Bull Music Academy
open early next year.
Contributors
Sue Apfelbaum
Marco Cibola
Adrienne Day
Hua Hsu
Izzy Sanabria
Ned Sublette
Nick Sylvester
Cover Photo An appropiation of Latin
NY’s first issue, 1973. Courtesy of Izzy
Sanabria.
Correction: Our May 6 feature “Rap 1.0”
misstated the name of the founder of the
HardC.O.R.E. newsletter. It is Steve Juon, not
Junon.
All photos from Tuesday
night’s THAT! event at
Glasslands. Clockwise
from top left: Crazy
Bitch in a Cave channels
Venus in Furs; Ghe2Ø
GØth1k’s Venus X DJing;
Le1f in a personal
moment onstage; Mykki
Blanco backstage.
Photos by Christelle
De Castro

FROM THE ACADEMY
upfrONT
4
fOur
TET
LIvE
101
A shoeless Kieran
Hebden explains his
concert setup.
PHOTO ANTHONY BLASkO
after fielding participants’
recurring questions
about playing for an audience,
Academy Studio mentor Kieran
Hebden (aka Four Tet) decided to
give an impromptu demo of his live
setup in the Academy lecture hall
on Tuesday. Hebden sat barefoot
on the floor with his gear in front
of him while participants gathered
around.
In his ideal live environment,
the computer shouldn’t block the
crowd’s view of the artist. “It creates
a boundary between you and
the audience,” Hebden says. “If I
get to a club and I don’t like the
way the DJ area is situated, just
let me set up in the middle of the
crowd. It’s guaranteed to save the
show. Everybody’s happy and can
be where they want to be.”
Hebden’s entire live rig can fit
into his carry-on luggage when he
travels, and this bare-bones aesthetic
extends to his software too.
He claims he’s never used an Apple
computer; “Hardly ever touched
one,” he says. He does use Ableton
Live software, however. “I don’t
know much about Ableton at all,
with all its endless functions. I want
the music to be ideas-driven rather
than equipment-driven.” Hebden
doesn’t tour with a sound engineer,
and runs everything through a DJ
mixer. (“The kind that every club in
the world has,” he says, “so I know it
will be the same every time.”) Separating
the channels through a mixer
makes a big difference, saving him
from dead silence in the event that
something crashes.
It also allows him to tweak the
sounds to the atmosphere of the
room. Hebden knows which tracks
will work together in terms of key
and tempo, and puts those next to
each other. “I have to plan something
slow at first so it can build up
to my most banging song. You look
at your tracks and figure out what
the best options are. I want to have
loud moments and I want to have
quiet moments.”
Academy participant Harald
Björk, who has played festivals on
the same bill as Four Tet, thinks this
is a sound piece of advice. “I did it
accidentally at my gig [Monday]
night at Cameo Gallery. They had
me play one extra song—I made
the track faster and realized that
[changing tempo] is a good way to
play and communicate with the audience.”
Hebden never tours with a
planned setlist, preferring to decide
on the fly what his opening songs
should be based on the previous act.
“Every show is different. Live electronic
music has the potential to be
very experimental and improvised.
At the end of the day, the crowd
doesn’t know what’s going on or
what to expect.” -OLIvIA GrAhAm
“It’s that thing of taking human feelings and making
them feel un-human—that’s the template for me.”
—Bok Bok, Night Slugs label head, May 8, 2013
ArTs AND
crAfTs
So far we’ve peppered the
Red Bull Music Academy 2013
participants with questions
designed to probe their musicobsessed
brains. But we had a
hunch that they are not just
inspired by the musicians who’ve
flourished here, but by New
York artists of all stripes.
Turns out we were right — here,
participants :PAPERCUTZ, Ada
Kaleh, and Yodashe tell us about
their favorite New Yorkers of
the non-musical-arts.
:pApErcuTz
Porto, PortugAl
“Woody Allen. We’re
so in love with him in
Portugal. there’s a
public petition to have
him film in lisbon.”
soundcloud.com/papercutz
DANcE
YrsELf
cLEAN
DFA Records’ irreverent new
documentary.
on wednesday, may 8, Red Bull Music Academy premiered
12 Years of DFA: Too Old to be New, Too New to be Classic,
a short film about the rise and reign of the beloved New
York label. Narrated by comedian, podcast hero, and music
obsessive Marc Maron, Too Old has interviews with a raft of
DFA artists—Holy Ghost!, the Juan MacLean, YACHT, and
more—and is more of a celebratory tribute than a staid,
self-serious history.
Too Old breezily tells the story of DFA’s transition from
a casual party for friends to an iconoclastic label with obsessive
fans. It spends less time on date-stamped milestones
than reveling in the bright personalities and pervasive “Don’t
stop the party” ethos that has propelled the ship forward.
The tone is light in keeping with the self-deprecating title
(taken from DFA founder and LCD Soundsystem frontman
James Murphy’s own motto for the company). It seems
that every artist, studio guy, or intern ever associated with
DFA shows up to cheekily roast label boss Jonathan Galkin
(“What does he do?”); James Murphy plays the jester, reclining
on the deck of a cruise ship while lobbing non-sequiturs
about peanut butter and hang gliding; an engineer sardonically
explains one secret behind the signature DFA dry drum
sound (spoiler: taped-on mousepads).
DFA is a tight-knit, familial crew—the film shows how
this labor of love is fueled by a relentless work ethic. It’s
refreshing to see a group of people, united by purpose and
driven by passion, accomplish so much while never losing
sight of the fact that making music—and listening, and dancing
to it—is supposed to be fun. Here’s to 12 more years.
Watch it now at redbullmusicacademy.com/magazine/dfa-film.
Ada kaleh
BuChArESt, romAniA
“i come from a dance
background, so merce
Cunningham. there were a
bunch of artists in the
’60s like Steve Paxton
and Yvonne rainer — each of
them opened up a new path
and a new understanding
of how you could actually
produce or conceptualize
dance.”
soundcloud.com/ama-diver
Yodashe
lonDon, EnglAnD
“Stephen Sondheim is
great. And Woody Allen.
i just love Woody Allen.
With [his movies], it’s
like you’re there — you’ve
been there — and you’re
going again. Every
movie is the same but
different.”
soundcloud.com/yodashe
TONIGhT
rOsELAND bALLrOOm
cuLTurE
cLAsh
fOur NEw
YOrk sOuNDs.
ONE wINNEr.
mAY
09
upcOmING
EvENTs
DArk DIscO @ 88 pALAcE
mETrO ArEA
GErD jANsON
bOk bOk
L-vIs 1990
INvITE ONLY
mIsTEr
sATurDAY
NIGhT vs.
DOpE jAms
DEEp spAcE @ OuTpuT
GIOrGIO
mOrODEr
fIrsT EvEr
LIvE Dj sET
TAmmANY hALL
brENmAr
NIck hOOk
sINjIN hAwkE
mOrE
kNITTING fAcTOrY
Drum mAjOrs
mANNIE frEsh
bOI-1DA
YOuNG chOp
Dj musTArD
mOrE
sANTOs pArTY hOusE
uNITED sTATEs
Of bAss
bIG frEEDIA
AfrIkA bAmbAATAA
EGYpTIAN LOvEr
Dj mAGIc mIkE
Dj AssAuLT
Dj fuNk + mANY mOrE!
srb brOOkLYN
ThE rOOTs
Of DubsTEp
skrEAm
mALA
pLAsTIcIAN
hATchA
mAY
10
mAY
19
mAY
20
mAY
21
mAY
22
mAY
23
mAY
24
rEcOrDED LIvE
FOR RED BULL MUSIC ACADEMY RADIO
TUNE IN AT RBMARADIO.COM
5

FROM THE ARCHIVES
6
Do you remember the first time you DJed in a club? Yes, I do. When you’re
really young and the world is your oyster, you really have no fear. I walked into
situations that were way beyond my knowledge, and walked in fearlessly because
I didn’t know any better. And I aced it every time. I guess that was just Lady Luck
being on my shoulder, I really don’t know what that was about. The first time that
I played in a club, it was a lesbian event on 24th Street. A friend of mine called me
and said, “Listen, do you think you can play in a club?” and I said, “Play what?”
They said, “Basically, dance music. Well, disco or whatever.” I was like, “How different
could it be from playing at the [radio] station except that you’re playing to
a live audience?” Who knew that I would get that wrapped into having the immediate
reaction of an audience? From that gig, some women who were opening a
club called Sahara asked me to audition for them, and I became their resident DJ
for the next four or five years. I really honed my skills because I continued to go to
the boys’ bars and go out to Fire Island. I would sit in every private club and every
after-hours club, every underground club you can name.
Can you describe to me the craft of DJing and the skills you value and
have honed? When I play, it’s very emotional for me. No matter what I’m feeling,
whether I’m angry or happy or sad or even indifferent, playing is like a
cathartic experience for me. I never get so wrapped up into myself that I don’t
realize that I’m playing for an audience, but I use their energy to help me channel
through stuff, so that I can rise above it and get to a
better place. The more the audience gives you, the more
you give the audience and you feed each other back and
forth. The trips like I did at the Saint, where you played
for a minimum of 12 hours… The kind of stamina that
it takes to concentrate for 12 hours straight with three
turntables in front of you and hundreds of thousands of
dollars worth of equipment and 6,000 people on your
dancefloor is unbelievable.
Also, 98% of those people are high as kites on every
drug in the universe. To get all those people to focus and
get into the same groove when they’re all jagged edges
is insane, yet it can be done. [DJs] went from kids that
liked to play records to young men and women who could
actually take their audience on a trip. And if you’re an
audiophile, the sound systems we played on were beyond
anything that anyone could even imagine. For instance,
the Saint had 28,000 watts of power and 10,000 watts of backup. Just to give you
an idea of how much actual sound that is, Giants Stadium held 80,000 people
and their sound system had 20,000 watts. That’s insanity, but it was tuned to
absolute perfection.
Standing behind the controls was like flying a spacecraft. If you did it right,
you’d get to the moon, you’d go to the stars. If you didn’t know what you were
doing, you’d crash, because it was so sophisticated. Everything in that room depended
on everything else. There had never been lighting like that in a club;
there had never been sound like that in a club. The capacity of the Saint was
6,000 people. It was a theater and it was a landmark building; it used to be the
Fillmore East, where I used to go as a kid and listen to every rock band in the
world. So the building itself had history, right there. It was built on history and it
was all about music. Every square inch of that building was built on music, so it
Q&A
shArON
whITE
One of New York’s first female DJs on excess,
beauty, and the power of sound.
was a magical place to be. It’s hard to imagine: the entire dancefloor was encased
in a geodesic dome that was translucent. The club itself cost like $8.5 million in
1980. That was some serious cash then. Now it would just be unaffordable. Nobody
in their right mind would put that kind of money into a club now. It’s just
never gonna happen again. Never.
DJ culture’s performance aspect is so different than that of a rock show—
with a DJ there’s more of a sense of privacy and more of a coded language
in terms of expressing yourself. I have a reputation for being one of the most
emotional DJs in the booth. I have never been ashamed to cry during a performance.
I think, for me, it’s such a release. When you hit a point where you feel
like you just touch bliss, there’s nowhere else to go but tears.
I remember the first time that happened to me. It was probably the defining
moment of my career. It was the moment that I had waited for my whole life.
Patti LaBelle had given me a copy of “Over the Rainbow”; she had recorded it
with her sister who was very ill and dying. She said to me, “I don’t know what
the label is going to do with this if anything—probably nothing—but I’ll let you
have it.” I had bumped into her in England, so I came back from England with
this acetate of “Over the Rainbow.” I told Mark Ackerman at the Saint, who is
probably my best friend and probably the best lighting designer and operator
in the business, “I’m coming in from Heathrow and I’m coming back with all
kinds of shit. Meet me in the dome at 2am.” So the two of
us were there at the Saint by ourselves, listening to these
tracks and working on putting together production numbers
between what I’m laying down, just thinking about
where we’re going to put this song. Anyway, this Patti La-
Belle song is amazing. I mean, Patti just sails.
That night I said to Mark, “Okay, I’m going to take
an encore now,” and he looked at me like I was crazy—I
mean, the place was fucking packed, wild, and I was playing
at like, 135 beats per minute. I said, “No, I’m gonna
do it after this song,” and he said, “No, it’s too early.” I
said, “If I’ve got their attention, I’ve got it now,” and I said,
“Black the room out so they can’t even find the exit signs.”
He had this master switch that shut everything down
in the room. When I tell you that, it was as still as your
mother’s womb—I mean, it was black—nothing. It went
from this intense bright light down to boom, nothing.
And then I started with “Over the Rainbow.”
Mark was really well-schooled in theatrical lighting so he added to the drama
and just gave things layers of warmth that other people didn’t even think of.
Mark was all about subtlety, so we made a great team. When the song was over
there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. Thousands of people just holding each other,
just sitting down, hands up in the air, screaming “Mark,” screaming “Sharon.”
The two of us hugged each other and just cried like babies. He just said, “You
did it, you did it,” and I said, “This is what I’ve been waiting for my whole life.”
Who said that all these people couldn’t feel one emotion in a room this big? I
said, “Look, there it is.” The encore went on forever. I have tears in my eyes just
thinking about it.
Interviewed by Elissa Stolman in April 2013 for redbullmusicacademy.com.
inseT PHoTo: CourTesy of sHAron wHiTe. oPPosiTe PAGe: CourTesy of TiMoTHy HArTLey sMiTH
7

FEATURE
Pianist Eddie
FEATURE
Palmieri getting
in the spirit at
Madison Square
Garden, mid-1970s.
8
buGALÚ ON
brOADwAY
The dawn of salsa in New York City.
Palmieri was talking about the way new styles stopped coming
into the US from the music capital of Havana after the Cuban
Revolution of January 1, 1959. It was an ironic, or perhaps a modest
thing for Palmieri to say, because what there was after the
mambo, the cha-cha-cha, and the pachanga was… Eddie Palmieri.
Puerto Ricans became United States citizens in 1917, setting
off a migration north that, by 1930 or so, made them the largest
Latin group in New York. When the US clamped down on immigration
during the Depression, it didn’t touch Puerto Ricans like
it did other Latinos. Operation Bootstrap in 1947, which aimed to
industrialize Puerto Rico’s agricultural economy, created an unemployment
crisis that triggered a large wave of migration, mostly to
New York, throughout the ’50s. When jet travel became the norm
in the ’60s, Puerto Rico, a poor colonial backwater one-ninth the
size of Cuba, entered into an open cultural circuit with the world’s
most connected city, while Cuba was closed off. By the time the
US removed national quotas on immigration controls in 1965 and
large numbers of people from other Antillean islands began arriving
in New York City, the Puerto Rican community was already
well established.
Most people in the US had never seen a Puerto Rican. The
only mass-media image of them was as murderous, not-exactly-white
delinquents in the feral, ballet-ridden streets of the
WORDS NED SUBLETTE
PHOTOGRAPHY AND ART IzzY SANABRIA
“There was the mambo,”
said Eddie Palmieri from
his piano bench onstage at the
Blue Note a few years ago,
“and after that there was the
cha-cha-cha. And after that there
was the pachanga. And after that
there was nothing.”
1962 film West Side Story (which was hated by many Puerto
Ricans). Yet despite their small numbers nationally, Puerto Ricans
had critical mass in New York. From there they had a disproportionate
impact on the music of the world via the imperial
reach of the city’s media power—through their own recordings
and, more broadly, through non-Latin pop and jazz records that
borrowed heavily from Latin music.
Puerto Ricans were playing jazz from its earliest days in New
York, and they’ve been part of every black music movement in
the city since, through hip-hop and beyond. Some sang doowop
on the street corners they shared with African-Americans.
Those who played mambo at Catskills resorts knew all about
shtick. The classic Puerto Rican plena records were made in
New York, and Afro-Rican traditionalists played bomba—but
most importantly for our story, Puerto Rican musicians played
the Cuban forms, albeit with their own distinct feel.
Eddie Palmieri was born in Manhattan to Puerto Rican parents
on December 15, 1936, and raised in the Bronx. As a kid
he used to tag along to watch his brother Charlie play piano in
Tito Puente’s band in the early 1950s. Coming up, Eddie played
with superstar big-band vocalist Tito Rodríguez (among many
others) before starting his own group, La Perfecta, whose first
album appeared in 1962.
9

FEATURE FEATURE
Charlie called his brother’s octet a trombanga: it had the
wooden flute of the then-popular charanga orchestras, but it
changed the format dramatically by replacing the typical two violins
with two trombones, one of them played by the hard-blowing
Barry Rogers, the principal figure in establishing the trombone
as a sonic signature of New York Latin music. Driven
by Palmieri’s intense, percussive piano style, La Perfecta was
popular with both Latin and African-American listeners, to say
nothing of the broad demographic cross-section of the Palladium
Ballroom’s dancers. “Azucar Pa’ Ti” (1965) was a radio hit in
New York, even with a playing time of nine-and-a-half minutes.
Meanwhile, Latin soul was happening. With blues changes,
a snaky horn glissando courtesy of arranger/trumpeter Marty
Sheller, a cha-cha-cha rhythm, fat percussion,
and a two-word chorus in English,
Cuban conguero (conga drummer) Mongo
Santamaría’s surprise-hit recording of the
young Herbie Hancock’s tune “Watermelon
Man” reached number ten on the Billboard
pop chart on April 27, 1963. It definitively
established the tumbadora (the
conga drum, introduced into jazz by Chano
Pozo with Dizzy Gillespie in 1947) in African-American
music, where the instrument
subsequently became central to funk. In the
wake of “Watermelon Man,” Mongo worked
six nights a week for largely African-American
audiences while recording covers of
soul hits for Columbia. When producer Da-
vid Rubinson teamed him with trap drummer
Bernard ‘Pretty’ Purdie, they created
a Latin-funk fusion that would inspire the
early days of disco.
But “Watermelon Man” didn’t have
much direct impact on Latinos in New York. They were feeling
“El Watusi,” a three-chord pachanga (uptempo Cuban dance
style) with charanga violins and fat congas that pointed the way
to a New York Latin soul style. Recorded by Nuyorican conguero
Ray Barretto with his Charanga Moderna, it entered the charts
the same week in 1963 that Mongo’s record peaked. The name “El
Watusi” was a nod both to the 1962 African-American dance fad
and to Barretto’s height; he was a giant of a man who made the
congas look tiny.
The mambo had lived its hottest moments at the Palladium
Ballroom with Machito, Tito Puente, Tito Rodríguez, and many
more, but that legendary room, which opened in 1948, closed in
1966; La Perfecta was the last band to play there. As a generational
shift took hold, with social dance in a post-twist crisis (because
teenagers no longer knew the rudiments of partner dancing), a
bubbling Latin-soul movement boiled over, aimed squarely at
crossover radio play and branded with a trendy name appropriated
from a string of African-American dance records that began
in 1965 with Tom and Jerrio’s “Boo-ga-loo.”
Retroactively spelled bugalú, it was homegrown New York
Latin music, most typically based on a simple Cuban-style
tumbao (groove) with a handclapped R&Btype
backbeat. (Though the Spanish spelling was not
in common use, I use it in order to differentiate this
style from the African-American boogaloo.) It was usually
sung in English or bilingually, often in a style that
imitated African-American soul singing, though not
always convincingly.
The most irresistible bugalú record was probably
Pete Rodriguez’s “I Like It Like That” (1966), and its
biggest national hit was the Joe Cuba Sextette’s “Bang
Bang,” which reached #63 on the Billboard Hot 100
in November 1966 and went top ten on many R&B
stations. (The “beep beep” hook of “Bang Bang” was
recycled in 1979 by Giorgio Moroder on Donna Summer’s
“Bad Girls.”) Despite his stage name of Joe Cuba,
Gilberto Calderón was a New York-born Puerto Rican
whose friends called him Sonny. When bugalú came
along, his Sextette was already one of the most popular
groups in town, with José ‘Cheo’ Feliciano, a fantastic
singer from Ponce, Puerto Rico, up front.
Bugalú caught on in Puerto Rico, where El Gran
Combo, founded in 1962, released Boogaloos con El
Gran Combo in 1967. South America was receptive,
and bugalú tracks were recorded in Colombia, Venezuela,
Ecuador, and Perú. Older Latin musicians criticized
it as lacking a strong sense of clave, the rhythmic
key that allows musicians to fit different simultaneous
rhythms together, but pretty much everyone recorded
it: Machito’s “Ahora Sí,” Puente’s “Shing a Ling,” and
Palmieri’s “Ay Que Rico,” all in ’68, were killers.
But the Latin-soul wave crested and crashed. What
10
followed was a back-to-the-roots movement of cultural pride
that had been building all along, one that emphasized singing
in Spanish for reasons of identity (as well as for marketing purposes)
and with an emphasis more on albums than singles. This
music looked to Afro-Cuba for inspiration, but it had become
jazzier in New York, and the rhythm was more tightly locked.
While doing a radio interview in Caracas around 1965, the
Puerto Rican timbalero and bandleader Willie Rosario was mystified
to hear DJ Phidias Danilo introduce his record by saying,
“Vamos a tocar otra salsa.” We’re going to play another… salsa?
LefT To riGHT: Posters for a bugalú session in the Bronx; the Fania All-Stars gig at Club Cheetah
on August 26, 1971 (taped for the film Nuestra Cosa Latina); the TV show “Salsa,”
which premiered in November 1973.
Salsa was a flavor word that a singer might shout to animate
the proceedings. Its use in music traces back at least to “Échale
Salsita,” the 1932 Cuban hit by Ignacio Piñeiro’s Septeto Nacional.
A 1962 album by New York-based Cuban charanga violinist
Félix “Pupi” Legarreta was titled Salsa Nova (a play on “bossa
nova”), and the word emerged in song titles like Joe Cuba’s “Salsa
y Bembé” (1962) and Ray Barretto’s “Salsa y Dulzura” (1966).
Danilo seems to have been the first person to use it consistently
as a generic term in ’64.
Salsa was not a specific rhythm. In the hands of Fania Records,
which made the marketing push, it was a big-tent brandding
idea for dance music mostly based on Cuban rhythms: son,
guaracha, guajira, guaguancó, etc. Cuban critics complained
that it was a way of avoiding saying “Cuba.”
There was more to salsa than Fania, but Fania was the boom.
Fania was founded in 1964 by Jerry Masucci, an Italian-American
ex-cop who’d spent quality time in Havana, and Johnny Pacheco,
who became the label’s first artist and music director. A
Dominican who arrived with his family in New York at the age
of 11, Pacheco became known as a flute soloist in Charlie Palm-
CLoCKwise froM ToP LefT: Conguero Joe Cuba; the great Celia Cruz
appearing at the Su Vida Musical concert at Madison Square Garden,
1982; Hector Lavoe at Madison Square Garden, 1974.
ieri’s Charanga La Duboney during the pachanga craze that
jumped out of Cuba in 1958. A dancer and visual comedian as
well as a wisecracking bandleader, he was a marvelously engaging
frontman. For Fania’s debut release, Cañonazo, he recast the
two-trumpet sound of Sonora Matancera, the most conservative
of the big Cuban dance bands of the ’40s and ’50s, with the sublime
vocals of the ponceño (from Ponce) Pete ‘Conde’ Rodríguez
(not to be confused with Pete Rodriguez of “I Like It Like That”).
When the Fania All-Stars were founded in 1968 under Pacheco’s
direction, its heartbeat was Ray Barretto’s congas. A veteran
of the Puente band (he took over Mongo’s chair in ’57) and
of many jazz dates, Barretto was a straight-arrow, hard-working,
no-nonsense taskmaster who broke in numerous up-andcoming
musicians. He hit his stride when
he signed with Fania in 1967, breaking
through with the Latin-jazz descarga
(jam-session) “Acid” and moving from a
charanga (with violins) to a conjunto (with
trumpets).
The All-Stars’ pianist was Brooklyn
bandleader Larry Harlow (né Lawrence
Ira Kahn), who teamed up with the young
Lower East Side singer Ismael Miranda
(and subsequently with Junior González)
to lead a rootsy restatement of the style of
Arsenio Rodríguez, the blind Afro-Cuban
who created the prototype of the trumpet-driven
salsa band with his conjunto
in ’40s Havana. Harlow also kicked off
the resurrection of Celia Cruz’s career by
casting her in his high-concept Hommy (a
takeoff on Tommy, the Who’s rock opera)
in 1973. Formerly a guarachera (a singer
of guarachas, an uptempo, non-romantic
Cuban style) with Sonora Matancera, Cruz had not been doing
much in Mexico after leaving Cuba. Now she remained in New
York where, recording with Pacheco and other bandleaders, she
became a bigger star than she had ever been in Cuba. She was
the only first-tier Cuban star of the New York salsa boom.
Pacheco signed the young Bronx trombonist Willie Colón to
Fania when he was 15—his mother had to be present at the signing—and
teamed him up with a talented kid from Ponce: Héctor
Pérez, professionally known as Héctor Lavoe. Colón’s first
album, El Malo (1967), had a punkish bugalú energy to it that
horrified older listeners but was a big hit. Colón and Lavoe developed
an international audience, receiving a rock-star reception
in Panamá in 1972. Lavoe became notorious for his heroin
addiction and his fragile emotional state (the two combined to
lead him to an early death), but is still one of the most beloved
Puerto Rican singers of all time.
Colón was a visionary producer, and was probably the Fania
bandleader who worked the hardest to get away from the Cuban
model. As his political consciousness developed along with
his career, he delved into the musical heritage of Puerto Rico,
adding the mandolin-like cuatro shredder Yomo Toro
to the front line. As his collaboration with Lavoe was
winding down, he entered into a new musical partnership
with Panamanian singer-songwriter Rubén Blades,
who had formerly sung with Barretto. Their 1978 album
Siembra, which looked from New York toward Latin
America, was an artistic and commercial landmark, a
hemisphere-wide success, and the biggest-selling salsa
album up to that point.
Eddie Palmieri, meanwhile, always remained rooted
in Cuban music, but he took a more experimental
turn after he dissolved La Perfecta in 1968—more complex
compositions, more jazz influence, more extended
jams (1974’s “Un Día Bonito” clocked in at 14:49), and
more political; check out Harlem River Drive, his edgy
1971 non-bugalú Latin/soul/jazz excursion with his
brother Charlie on Hammond, or the following year’s
Live at Sing Sing. He didn’t sign with Fania until 1981,
for whom he recorded numbers that you’ll hear at any
old-school salsa dance today. But like Puente, he disliked
the word salsa—“disrespectful,” he called it in a
2012 interview.
By and large these and the scads of other great musicians
on the scene were not playing love songs. Salsa
lyrics were cultural—educational, even. They spoke of
dancing, drums, history, community, ethnic and national
consciousness, food, and street situations which
the soneros (improvising singers) then commented on
in improvisations, all while issuing a call to party.
Except for the hairstyles and clothes on the album
covers, the records of the New York salsa years haven’t
dated much. They still sound great today, and there
are a lot of them. Recorded in good studios with world-class
engineers, these were time-is-money sessions that captured urgent
performances by highly professional bands that made their
living playing for dancers.
And then there was the movie.
Years before spray-can taggers were considered artists,
the opening titles of the film Nuestra Cosa Latina (Our Latin
Thing) were done in graffiti, to the soundtrack of Ray Barretto’s
funky “Cocinando Suave.” Centered on an all-star jam by
the Fania All-Stars in August 1971, at the Cheetah (at 53rd and
Broadway, the same block where the Palladium once stood), and
filled out with segments shot in the trash-ridden streets of the
barrio, the movie was an expensive gamble on Masucci’s part.
Director Leon Gast hung 278 color-gelled lights in the club and
brought in his own electricity. The music was shot live with five
cameras in a packed house, capturing on film a cast of largerthan-life
personalities at a peak of collective excitement.
Conspicuously absent from Our Latin Thing was the
word salsa, which turned up in 1973 as the title of a lo-
cal TV dance-party show hosted by Izzy Sanabria, and in
1974 as the title of a hit album by Larry Harlow. By then
the term had stuck, and it was doing enough business in
New York to be taken seriously: Brooklyn-born promoter
Ralph Mercado was producing four-hour multi-artist
salsa shows at Madison Square Garden.
Puerto Rico embraced the term enthusiastically. El
Gran Combo, already the island’s most popular band, became
its most popular salsa band. On the southern coast,
Sonora Ponceña, founded in 1954, perhaps qualifies as
Puerto Rico’s oldest salsa band; founder Enrique ‘Quique’
Lucca recently turned 100. Meanwhile, dance bands all
over Latin America were inspired by Cuban-style music in
their own ways as salsa became a musical lingua franca. In Venezuela,
the bass-playing lead singer of Dimensión Latina, Oscar
d’León, went solo to become a hemispheric superstar, putting his
own spin on the dance moves, phrasing, and repertoire of 1950s
Cuban idol Benny Moré. When d’León played in Cuba in 1983, he
practically caused an earthquake there. In Barranquilla, Colombia,
Fruko y sus Tesos lead singer Joe Arroyo went solo in 1981 to
start his band La Verdad and become a national legend.
By the late 1980s, salsa had become the core of a radio format
called “tropical.” As corporate control of commercial radio
consolidated, what radio programmers wanted was salsa
romántica. As a formula, it was deadly, but something essential
about salsa was lost in the transition to radio-driven love songs.
As Willie Rosario put it in an interview with George Rivera, “the
focus became the physical appearance of the vocalist, and not
the music”—meaning that TV preferred to show skinny young
white guys, even if they couldn’t find the clave with a flashlight.
The music was often tracked one instrument at a time to a machine-generated
click, losing the sense of jamming that had pervaded
Fania-era salsa. In the process, radio mostly stopped playing
new records by members of the original salsa generation.
Salsa lyrics were cultural—
educational, even. They spoke
of dancing, drums, history,
community, ethnic and
national consciousness, food,
and street situations... all
while issuing a call to party.
Salsa romántica dominated the salsa heard on radio in the
’90s, even as it yielded airtime to merengue (the Dominican
dance rhythm, distinct from salsa), and then bachata (also Dominican).
Some soneros of high quality worked within the radio
framework (notably Gilberto Santa Rosa and his protégé Víctor
Manuelle), but hardcore salsa fans gave up listening to commercial
Latin radio. Marc Anthony, a more compelling singer
than his many imitators, became the biggest salsa star ever, but
Fania bandleader
Willie Colon,
mid-1970s.
then transitioned over to English-language pop. He subsequently
came back, though, and has a new salsa album coming out
this year.
The Fania label hasn’t been a force in more than 20 years,
and its catalog has been sold and resold. The Monday-night
Salsa Meets Jazz jams at the Village Gate stopped when the
club closed in 1993. Ralph Mercado produced his 31st, and last,
New York Salsa Festival at Madison Square Garden in 2006,
and died in 2009.
Barretto’s gone. Puente’s gone. Pete ‘Conde’ and Celia are gone.
But a lot of veterans are still out there playing. There’s a salsa
scene in New York, but you have to look harder to find it. Salsa’s
strongholds today are elsewhere: the Día Internacional de la Salsa
in Puerto Rico this March drew 40,000 people. Perhaps the
biggest salsa party anywhere is the Feria de Cali, Colombia,
in which an entire city is given over to dancing for the last
week of the year. Meanwhile, Cuba’s doing something else
entirely—they call it timba, and its major artists have been
showing up to play in New York off and on since the mid-’90s.
At 76, with nine Grammys on his mantle, Eddie Palmieri’s
playing better than ever, and he heads up several different
ensembles. He started a cutting-edge Latin jazz septet in the
’90s; I saw them stun an outdoor crowd at Houston iFest in
2010. Sometimes he plays with a quartet. He goes out with
La Perfecta II, who thrilled thousands of people the night I
caught them at the Barranquijazz festival in Barranquilla, Colombia,
in 2011, playing non-nostalgic reconstructions of his
early ’60s book, and he also leads the Eddie Palmieri Salsa
Orchestra. Last year he played Hamburg, Bogotá, the Hollywood
Bowl in Los Angeles, Tokyo, Melbourne, Johannesburg, and
many other places. This year he was named an NEA Jazz Master.
He lives in Las Vegas now. Sometimes he plays in New York.
Go hear him.
Thanks to George Rivera.
For more info on Izzy Sanabria check out salsamagazine.com
11

COLUMNS COLUMNS
run-dmc was one of the first rap acts to
break into the mainstream. In addition to
their clockwork rhymes, earworm hooks, and
guitar riffs that fed their cross-genre appeal,
it didn’t hurt that the Hollis, Queens, trio
looked sharp in unscuffed, unlaced shell-toe
Adidas, fedoras and Kangol hats, and thick
gold chains. Keeping with their tougherthan-leather
image was a killer logo that
looked invincible writ large on t-shirts and
merch. Stacked between two thick red lines
and set in Franklin Gothic Heavy, the allcaps
RUN and DMC form one of the most
imitated logos of all time.
Finding out who designed it… that’s
tricky. Graffiti artist turned designer Cey
Adams, who did the hand-lettering on
Run-DMC’s self-titled debut, is often given
credit by mistake. When asked, Adams
responded, “To this day, nobody really
knows for sure exactly who did it. But it
was done by a designer in England that did
the King of Rock album and the ‘You Talk
Too Much’ single [in 1985].” Now the truth
is out: Ashley Newton, then the head of
12
LOGOs
The origins of
iconic images from
NYC's musical history
explained.
A&R at Island Records and now the CEO
of Columbia, commissioned the logo from
the label’s in-house team, specifically one
Stephanie Nash.
Nash, now co-principal of Michael Nash
Associates, a London design studio, did not
expect any individual credit. “I remember
listening [to the music] and thinking how
visually typographic it was,” she says via
email. “Rap was very inspirational for me at
that time: large, meaningful, hard-hitting
words used with such power that I had not
heard before.” Her choice of the typeface
came about simply: “At the time we had
a limited number of fonts available, and
Franklin Gothic was ‘tough’ and forthright
without being old-fashioned or faddish.
[It’s a] good, solid, no-nonsense font. Run-
DMC’s name helped in having two sets of
three letters.” The fact that it’s lasted so long
she attributes to MF Benton, the typeface’s
designer, and the strength of Run-DMC
itself. “If the same graphic had been done
for a pop band, it would not have acquired
the same kudos.” -suE ApfELbAum
A column on
the gear and
processes that inform
the music we make.
this column has focused on the
creative limits of gear and space in music-making,
but there are simpler, far more
significant limitations: using people instead
of machines; writing for the radio; juggling
the signifiers of your genre. Decisions in
these categories affect the final products
more than any boutique preamp ever
could. For Andrew Raposo and his band
Midnight Magic, this means dealing with
the limits and expectations of disco music
and playing in a live disco band. In addition
to Midnight Magic, Raposo and his studio
partner Morgan Wiley operate the Midnight
Sound Studio in Greenpoint.
RBMA: What are the distinct production
elements that you hold on to from disco’s
heyday?
Andrew Raposo: Percolating synth arpeggios,
horn and string arrangements, big vocals
with lots of harmonies, and, yes, sometimes
octaves on the bass.
RBMA: What happened to the disco
bridge?
AR: I believe Todd Terje devised a plan to
edit the disco bridge out of history. Ask people
to hum the bridge from a classic disco
song they’ve heard on the dancefloor recently
and they can’t.
RBMA: Is recording live drums still worth
it to you?
AR: Very much so! I can’t imagine working
on a whole record that does not incorporate
live drum and percussion elements. Finding
new and better ways of recording live
drums is probably the most fun one can
have as an engineer.
RBMA: What are the production tricks
you’ve learned in the last year that have become
integral to your workflow?
AR: Parallel compression. Placing a mic on
the beater side of the kick drum. Playlist
view in Pro Tools.
RBMA: Many clubs aren’t well equipped to
handle live dance bands. How do you deal?
AR: If the only reason you’re thinking of
pulling the plug on a show is because the
sound system doesn’t meet the requirements
of your tech rider, you’re most likely
an asshole. If we can’t gate the drums or
buss-limit all three horns, I’m not going
to throw a tantrum about it. Our band can
play and our singer can sing and performing
live is our favorite thing to do.
-NIck sYLvEsTEr
sTuDIO b
six years before hannah, Marnie, and their
friends set cameras rolling in Greenpoint and made the
neighborhood a nationally notorious hipster enclave,
the building at 259 Banker Street —located on a desolate,
warehouse-dotted stretch of asphalt —became, for a few
short years, the only place in town for a real sweat-andbrew-fueled
dance party.
It was the mid-aughts—the nadir of New York’s underground
dance-music scene—and Manhattan club life
had been in retreat after years of embattlement under
Giuliani. The owners of the Delancey in Manhattan and
Studio A in Miami saw an opportunity for a new dance
club, which they christened Studio B. The space had
room for a generous dancefloor, and was located in an
area zoned for industry (never mind the fact that some
local building owners were in the process of moving new
residents into the area, proper permits notwithstanding),
though it was still close enough to the booming
young populace in Williamsburg.
The two-story, 17,000-plus square-foot room officially
opened in the fall of 2006. One of its first events
was a Todd P. party featuring experimental noise band
Black Dice. Soon Studio B was the place to see acts like
Hercules & Love Affair, Trevor Jackson, Little Boots,
Andrew W.K. (who hosted indie-rock karaoke), Optimo,
Diplo, and Brazilian Girls. And of course there was
LCD Soundsystem, who would go on to sell out Madison
Square Garden a few years later. Relatively isolated from
the police’s watch, Studio B channeled the anything-goes
approach of ’90s Manhattan clubland—the thriving
dance-rock scene finally had a home in Brooklyn.
But the owners’ decision to add a rooftop garden
and outdoor bar to the space proved to be Studio B’s
undoing. Noise complaints started rolling in. Permits
for the extra construction were improperly filed, or not
filed at all, and to make matters worse, the club now had
tenants in the adjoining building. After much back-andforth
with the local community board, and after repeated
closings and tantalizingly brief re-openings, Studio B
shut down for good in July 2009. But not before establishing
the blueprint for how to properly throw down in
the outer boroughs. -ADrIENNE DAY
TOp 5…
rEsIDENT Djs
IN NYc
PRESENTED BY
DJs jetting in from abroad might get the biggest
billing on the flyer, but local jocks can do just
as much damage. Be they promoters, up-and-comers,
or label owners, New York is rife with immensely
talented locals who are helping make the scene
particularly special right now. The message from
these five is clear: skip the residents’ sets at
your peril.
1DAvE Q
Whether or not you’ve
heard him, you’ve
certainly felt
Dave’s influence:
his Dub War parties
were among the first
stateside to feature
dubstep. He’s
remained steps ahead,
championing emerging
sounds you didn’t
know you should be
obsessed with yet.
LANDmArks
The places, spaces,
and monuments of
NYC's musical past,
present, and future.
PAsT feATureD LAnDMArKs
1 MAX NEUHAUS’ “TIMES SqUARE”
2 THE THING SECONDHAND STORE
3 THE LOFT
4 MARCY HOTEL
5 ANDY WARHOL’S FACTORY
6 qUEENSBRIDGE HOUSES
7 RECORD MART
8 DEITCH PROJECTS
9 AREA/SHELTER/VINYL
sTATEN IsLAND
2
rEm kOOLhAus
Brooklyn monthly
TURRBOTAX® has enough
residents for three
parties, but let’s
just focus on one.
Koolhaus, aka party
cofounder Tim Saputo,
is behind the crew’s
inimitable visual
aesthetic, and he’s
been integral in
forging its sweaty,
house-centric sound.
mANhATTAN
brOOkLYN
3
mIkE sErvITO
Hailing from Detroit,
Servito holds down
the Bunker’s late
shift with all-vinyl
sets ensnaring
the best of Chicago,
Detroit, and beyond.
His choices make
obvious his lifelong
obsession with dance
music, plus have a
serious knack for
keeping you out well
past bedtime.
7
3
9
8
1
7
5
5
5
4
8
8
2
WHAT: sTuDio B
WHERE: 259 BAnKer
sT., GreenPoinT
WHEN: 2006-2009
WHY: ePiCenTer of
DAnCe-roCK AnD
eLeCTro-House
4
jAmEs frIEDmAN
Friedman has toiled
for over a decade.
As the force behind
Throne of Blood and
Let’s Play House,
he’s got international
cred. But he
remains a local at
heart, championing
the city’s sounds and
bringing disco-rinsed
house to its clubs.
6
ThE brONX
QuEENs
5
TAImur & fAhAD
Blkmarket Membership
presents techno on a
grand scale, so you’d
imagine that residents
Taimur & Fahad
(two-thirds of the
party’s management)
have their hands full
the evening of. But
listening to their
meticulously crafted
warm-ups, you’d never
know it.
13

New York storY
like many people not actually from here, I learned the
geography of New York from records. At first, it was just from
listening to and studying them—all those anthems dedicated to
obscure street corners, all the exotic-sounding addresses and
studios listed on record sleeves, pictures of people standing in
front of massive complexes of brick and glass. What was Chung
King? Why were so many things along Broadway? Where did
everyone park their cars? Was Hoyt-Schermerhorn a real place?
Anything that wasn’t the California suburbs was strange and
thrilling to me, and drinking in the minutiae of everyday life
in New York only had the effect of making the city seem more
mysterious than ever.
It wasn’t until I moved to the East Coast in the early aughts
that I began to appreciate these places as real and oftentimes
modest, but it was no easier figuring out my place among them.
I’m not blessed with a great sense of direction, and it was a
challenge just trying to get from one record store to the next.
It was while pacing back and forth on a quiet stretch of what
I presumed to be Sixth Avenue, searching for Fat Beats, that
I discovered there was also a 6th Street. It’s how I nurtured
my disinterest in the Upper West Side, the reason it took me
so long to appreciate Queens. Long-defunct record shops are
still the landmarks that guide my wanderings through the East
Village. One day, a college friend who had moved to Brooklyn
told me about a guy in her building who ran a small record
shop out of his living room. I was dubious. I mentioned it to
my friend Dave, who had moved to New York a couple years
prior and was therefore Magellan in my eyes. He had no idea
what I was talking about. It seemed improbable to me that this
store could be any good. It took me a while to find my way over.
If Manhattan didn’t seem intimidating enough, then Brooklyn,
which seemed to take up nearly a third of the subway map, was
like an entirely different planet. Weekend Records was on the
second floor of an old warehouse right off Kent Street, near
Williamsburg’s then-condo-free waterfront. The building was
worn with age and the interior was sparse and unruly, unlike
the elbow-to-elbow congestion I was used to in Manhattan.
As I arrived at the top of the stairs, the open door of Weekend
seemed to burst with life. This guy Makoto had put up walls in
the front of his loft, and on the left and right-hand side of the
room were rows of record browsers. There were shelves on the
walls showcasing pricier items, only one of which I recognized
(Black Sheep’s “The Choice Is Yours”). There were boxes of records
on the ground, some of them covered with bed sheets.
There was a small desk against the far wall with a turntable,
a speaker mounted on the wall, a stack of records waiting to
be priced. And there was Dave, flipping through some ’80s rap
records. He told me it was his first time there too.
It had all the trappings of a proper store. The records were
classified by genre. Anything that wasn’t in great shape had a
tiny as is sticker. Makoto had made business cards with himself
as the Tommy Boy logo. There was even a bathroom. Weekend
was full of records I didn’t know or understand. I was interested
in pretty generic things—’90s hip-hop records and the records
sampled by ’90s hip-hop records, mostly. But the borderlessness
of Weekend was thrilling, confusing. Makoto would play
14
LOsT
wEEkEND
A Cali transplant becomes a New Yorker with
help from a Williamsburg groove merchant.
WORDS HUA HSU
ILLUSTRATION MARcO cIBOLA
spaced-out disco, weird folk records, twee pop, lots of samba.
He would be dancing along to Saint Etienne one moment, rapping
along to random late-1980s rap records from Boston the
next. He would take a jazz record out of your hand, slide it out
of its sleeve, inspect its grooves, slap it on the turntable, and
drop the needle on its most luminous passage. I didn’t always
understand what Makoto was saying. He would often sell me
something simply by dancing along to it (Blvd. Mosse’s cheery,
Wings-sampling “U Can’t Escape the Hypeness”) or playing it on
his turntable and pointing at a riff in the air.
Most record shops seem to thrive on indifference, if not outright
intimidation. But if you were interested in whatever Makoto
was playing, he would gladly dig up a dozen more records
you might also like. It was always revelatory to hear the records
he was keeping for himself—the wispy-warm, lo-fi soul of Larry
T and the Family’s I’m Movin’ On, rare Miami bass records,
Stargaze’s “You Can’t Have It,” Phase N’ Rhythm’s “Brainfood,”
which he said he found from a “trash man.” “You mean someone
selling things on the sidewalk?” I asked. “No,” he explained
flatly, “a homeless man pushing a shopping cart full of trash.”
He had seen some records and asked if he could look at them. I
was obsessed with finding records, and this was as close as Makoto
ever came to revealing where he procured his stock. Soon
I was patrolling the sidewalks of the Lower East Side, hoping
to come up with something. The closest I came was a “Rump
Shaker” 12-inch I saw sticking out of a wet suitcase next to a
trash heap along Avenue C. I grabbed it anyway.
At the time I would DJ around the city, often at a weeknight
party some friends threw at Plant Bar in the East Village. We
never got paid and I don’t think I ever improved as a DJ, but
it was a wonderful excuse to keep buying more records. The
cabaret laws, long-dormant 1920s-era codes which were being
enforced again to improve the city’s image, were still in effect,
so the guy at the door would flip a switch and a bulb in the DJ
booth would light up if for some reason the police decided to descend
upon a dozen people dancing. By virtue of being allowed
to DJ there, I didn’t presume that Plant Bar was some venue of
world-historical importance. Years later, I realized that the bartender
was actually in the Rapture, that the people who would
start the DFA and Acute record labels were always around, that
there was a reason someone would play “House of Jealous Lovers”
every single night I was there. At the time, it was just friends
playing records and hanging out in a small room to which we
could, for a few hours on a slow night, lay claim.
Nobody cared about what I was playing and the mixtapes
I made never circulated past three or four others, and yet I
thought of Weekend and Makoto’s dizzying trove as a kind of secret
weapon. Our friends Betty and June had made flyers for his
shop featuring a full-color comic strip of Makoto—identifiable
by his bucket hat, glasses, and pet cat—adventuring through
caves, mazy underwater passages, and mountainside cliffs in
search of a stash of rare records. Some of us Weekend regulars
thought that it would be better to destroy the stack, lest anyone
else discover the shop. Then again, I think I only gave those
flyers to friends who lived in California. A business needs customers,
and maybe this is why Weekend Records never really
succeeded by any recognizable metric of profit and loss. Weekend
wasn’t a business so much as it was a community, a fantasy
world Makoto sought to populate with model customers and
neighborhood regulars, sort of like one of his wondrously eclectic
mixtapes. He even had a rack of clothes and vintage bags for
bored girlfriends. Record collecting can make people incredibly
petty hoarders, but that kind of thing didn’t fly at Weekend. If
you tried to bargain his prices down too much or if you dared
peek underneath the bedspread covering the unpriced boxes,
Makoto’s English would magically get worse and he would make
the transaction near impossible. He said he didn’t want to sell
his records to just anyone. It was more like he was assigning
his things new homes—a portable record player from Japan for
Betty, a Miami bass license plate for Dave, a vintage cardigan for
my then-girlfriend.
Late one night, I was flipping through records and sipping a
beer. Makoto was sitting at his desk smoking a cigarette. It was
quiet, which was unusual. He said there was something about
me that reminded him of his father—maybe it was my glasses
or posture or just the lateness of the hour; I couldn’t quite
follow what he was saying. He dug through a box at his feet
and handed me a copy of Schoolly D’s “C.I.A.” It was still in its
shrink-wrap and its green sleeve still had its original price sticker.
“Have this,” he said. When I asked him how much he wanted,
he waved both of his hands and shook his head. He said he just
wanted me to have it. I began to try and explain my gratitude,
not just for the record, but for his shop and camaraderie as well.
He just offered this wide, unresponsive smile.
There was always a steady enough stream of regulars coming
through Weekend, and occasionally you would run into people
like Kenny Dope or DJ Shadow or the guys who would go on to
form the Rub. But it never seemed to grow past its status as a
loosely guarded secret. Makoto moved back to Japan a few years
ago, though he would always seem to materialize in New York
at record shows or barbecues, always with a heavy bag of new
acquisitions. He is finally ready to reopen Weekend Records, he
told me, as a proper store in Tokyo.
New York will never have another place like Weekend Records,
or at least I like to think that (as someone with some
vague investment in the uniqueness of my own experiences).
It’s more likely that there already is and I simply don’t know
about it, because it’s no longer mine. After a while on those
nights, the combination of Makoto’s secondhand smoke, his
cat’s dander, and the dust from all those records made it impossible
to breathe, but it never occurred to me to leave. I would
usually make my way to the nearest subway at two or three in
the morning, and I remember thinking I was somehow defying
death on those ten-minute walks. I would clutch my records
to my chest and look at all the quiet warehouses and sleeping
cargo trucks, and the city would again seem unknowably vast,
but at least a small part of it made sense to me.
Hua Hsu teaches at Vassar College and writes
for Grantland. He’s currently finishing his first
book, A Floating Chinaman. He can be found at
twitter.com/huahsu.
15

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