BEATROUTE MAGAZINE AB EDITION JANUARY 2019

JUCY
BY B. SIMM
SOUL CLAP a rugged individualist, a Texan punk, throws the world’s best dance parties
Jonathan Toubin born in Houston, Texas grew up during the
‘70s and ‘80s in a hotbed of R&B, soul, rock ‘n’ roll and all
things Southern States. In the ‘90s he attended university in Austin
playing in a variety of bands and fully emerged in the free-wheelin’
punk consciousness that would come to distinguish SXSW as a
game-charger and new frontier for progressive music. By 1998 he
was in New York as a musician but after the Twin Tower attacks he
returned to university to work on a graduate degree critiquing hiphop
in the early ‘80s. By the mid 2000s Toubin was back in the clubs
throwing parties under the banner of the New York Night Train
where he spun an enormous cross-section of music that spanned
punk, ‘60s garage, psychedelia, noise rock, girl groups, surf, blues,
rockabilly and country. Eventually he gravitated to ‘50 and ‘60s soul
and R&B records which are the staple of his fabulous, touring Soul
Clap show Toubin is renowned the world over for.
Coming from Texas with all that exposure to pure, raw blues
and a cultivated garage-punk scene that started to solidify at
SXSW in the ‘90s, then moving to New York awash with artschool
hipsters, then studying hip-hop culture as an academic,
while delving into the archives of American rock ‘n’ roll, R&B
and soul... that covers a lot of ground. Let’s talk a little about
that. First, Austin in the ‘90s. A lot of blues can fall into formulaic,
repetitive three-chord shuffles that often aren’t inspiring.
Your Austin experience wasn’t that. How so?
A lot of folks moved from around the world to Austin in the 1980s
and 1990s to be the next Stevie Ray Vaughan or whatever but that
was an alternate universe to the one I inhabited. Like electro in New
York today, it rarely overlapped with my
world. You gotta remember that, even
though Austin only had 300,000 people
then, it had dozens of night clubs with
all kinds of music pumping every night.
Blues was popular but Austin also had
loads of funk and folk and rockabilly and
surf and punk and country and reggae
and what you today call “indie rock” but
we called “college rock.” Since I was in
some bands and DJing on college radio
and working at a record store, I was
around a lot of people with varied taste.
While by far the majority of me and my
friends’ idea of the Austin music tradition
was The Butthole Surfers, Scratch
Acid, The Dicks, and The Big Boys, there
were some curve balls. Classic country
yodeler Don Walser who was huge
with the grunge/punk crowd. As was
Jay Clark, a geriatric blind organist at a
creepy circus-themed bar across from an
old-peoples’ home specializing in “Girl
From Ipanema.” And a few of us would
go see an ancient 1930s barrelhouse
blues pianist named the Grey Ghost.
And iconic rootsy legends like Doug
Sahm and The Texas Tornadoes and
Willie Nelson and Townes Van Zandt
were still alive and active and had a big place the hearts of a lot of
people I knew who weren’t always as heavy into rootsier music! As
for the blues, the best things ever were the couple of Antone’s Anniversary
parties where they flew in Pinetop Perkins, Jimmy Rodgers,
Willie “Big Eyes” Smith, and the rest of Muddy Waters’ band. Also
I’d try to get one of the waitresses to sneak me in or my dad to take
me when Antone’s had a 50s/60s classic blues star like Albert Collins
or Otis Rush or whatever. Those nights were the only ones where I’d
come across local white blues musicians, many of whom were very
legit, as openers. I wasn’t deep into that scene and only a tourist. So,
in summary, I could barely smell the blues cheese from where I was
standing during my Austin years.
The grad program in American Studies at CUNY where you
studied hip-hop culture in the early ‘80s. What were you specifically
trying to focus on?
No! I was in the American Studies department and my mentor was
a really cool musicologist named Ellie Hisama and she had a hip-hop
seminar. My lone published essay was from that class anthology and
was about the interactions between the uptown hip-hop scene and
the downtown art/music world. People who look me up think I was
a hip-hop scholar, but it was just a small part of what I was looking
into at the time. I was also working on imperialist jazz, Jewish blackface,
Memphis Minnie, and a number of other subjects.
As a DJ, you played a lot of genres but gravitated to soul and
dug in deep. Was there a specific turning point, event or epiphany
that set you in that direction?
Jonathan Toubin, NYC’s 45 RPM grandmaster of soul and R&B.
I’ve loved getting down to some James Brown since my teens and
a deep feeling for soul music as long as I can remember, but never
bothered to get a whole lot deeper than Stax or Motown or Atlantic
sides and hits until I started working with 45s at the rock ‘n’ roll dive
where I got my start – the much-missed and iconic Motor City Bar
(in NYC). I found some pretty cool R&B singles outside my house
and a friend at a junk store who heard me play them called to tell
me a huge lot of soul 45s just came in. So I went in and grabbed a
few hundred of them. I think he charged me $3. The small label R&B,
soul and funk had so much rawness and energy in common with
the indie label punk, post-punk, and other underground records I
grew up with that I thought the sounds belonged together. Since I
initially got a bit of criticism for playing so many soul records at the
rock club, I decided to start a party where I could play soul records
all night in a more general space where people wouldn’t mind – so
the grumps who didn’t like it didn’t have to come. Despite deliberately
removing the party from the rock ‘n’ roll culture, the crowd
wounded up being almost exclusively from the North Brooklyn art/
punk/rock ’n’ roll community. I didn’t really know any soul people
at the time. So my crowd and I grew and learned together and built
our own little world and perception of the music organically at
first. Also, I continued to sneak some soul in my sets at Motor City
and over time the people coming to the rock party became more
tolerant to the point where some of the bar DJs started their own
soul nights there. Finally, I got offered occasional dance party gigs
early on. But I was really lost trying to communicate with dancers.
So soul music became a good way to retain my aesthetics and not
ruin the party.
When I read that you scout out record
stores looking for obscure R&B and
soul 45s from the ‘50 and ‘60s and
that places like Cleveland, Detroit
and Pittsburg are havens for them to
be found, I instantly thought of the
Northern Soul DJs coming to pillage
America for its treasures. But to be
honest, most of Northern Soul CD
comps and play lists I’ve experienced
haven’t been, except for a handful of
tracks, overwhelming. And I’ve experienced
your show, which IS powerful.
With respect to the NS DJs, I’d say
you’ve cultivated something much
different. Would you agree? What’s the
difference between you and NS?
Thanks! I think there’s no right and
wrong and its more just aesthetic
differences. As with seeing a band, when
I go dancing I want the DJ to be dynamic
and raw and diverse and exciting and I
like the music to swing. I don’t just want
a pulse but I want spice and originality
and feel. Like the Ronnie Dawson song
says, “If the music’s gonna move me,
it’s gotta be action-packed!” When
Northern Soul started separating from
Mod, like any other counter-culture, the
PHOTO: ALEXANDER THOMP-
JUCY BEATROUTE • JANUARY 2019 | 27