eMusic Q&A: Steinski

There are many unlikely turns in the story of Steve Stein, otherwise known as Steinski, one of the accidental pioneers of cut-and-paste dance music. In the early 1980s, Stein was a successful, thirty-something New York advertising executive who traded in the life of the comfortably middle-aged for a lunge at hip-hop semi-stardom. In 1982, he and his friend Douglas “Double Dee” DiFranco casually entered and easily won a Tommy Boy mega-mix contest. Given the duo’s extensive knowledge of old breaks, their collection of spoken word, comedy, soul, rock and jazz records and their access to an actual professional studio, the competition simply had no chance.

Bootlegged copies of their winning entry as well as their subsequent “Lessons” collages blew minds from the South Bronx to South Africa, and Steinski and Double Dee are today recognized as a starting point for the lineage of cut-and-paste artists that includes DJ Shadow, Coldcut, Massive Attack and Girl Talk. But beyond his significance as a historical figure, Steinski’s music — old and new — still sounds brazen, witty and refreshing today. Here he discusses New York in the 1970s, hearing hip-hop for the first time and toilet paper.

(Full disclosure: the following excerpts are from the unpublished transcripts of an interview I originally conducted for the liner notes of What Does it All Mean?)

You moved to New York in the late 1970s. Did you ever get to see any of the famous disco or early hip-hop DJs?

The Mudd Club was huge. It was before it became the Studio 54 of the downtown hipsters. It was just a doorway, and you had to know about it. You would go straight in and there was no velvet rope or any of that crazy shit. It was fantastic, man. They really did play everything. They did have performances later on — they had an esoteric booking policy. But yeah that was a great club. The Mudd Club didn’t even advertise that they had any DJs. They were just guys, you didn’t know who they were.

Were you working in advertising at the time?

Working seven days a week, staying late, going to school. There was a guy who gave private classes to a select group of people. I was studying with him and that’s when I started getting good at advertising.

I remember one time — and it was one of the hardest assignments we had — we went to this guy’s loft and sat down, and every week he would have a product for us to work on. He picked up a roll of toilet paper and said, "Okay, here’s Cottonelle toilet paper. The purpose of this class is to help you get an idea for something like this, so that you don’t commit suicide before the meeting." We learned how to work on really hard, nasty packaged goods. At that time there was a formula for good advertising, there was a way to make it interesting. It’s a little different now, especially for me, because being good at advertising now means being involved in the culture so you can write a headline to makes reference to say Seinfeld, and everyone understand that and understand the little trick you’re playing.

All that time, I was buying records like a madman, and we moved to Brooklyn. That was the transition of Manhattan to Brooklyn, from being a student to being good at it. I put up my periscope and realized — I’m good at this. Now if I stay in this for years and years I’m going to end up like these other assholes. That’s when I started getting disaffected with the whole thing.

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I got good turnouts, I had a lot of fun, I met some girls — which at that time was more important than money.

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So how did you start DJing?

I joined a food co-op. It was a lot like being in school. A lot of hairy hippies. There was a communal ethos, which I definitely bought into, and that was all fine for me. So I went to one of their parties. At that point the dance parties at the coops were inside the co-op, amidst the food, and there was a table with a home stereo and someone sitting there with a cassette. Everyone could bring a cassette, and this guy would play them for ten minutes a pop. So there would be country and western followed by Mexican polkas followed by whatever. Interest would wane, and I went over to the guy and said, "You guys ever think about having a DJ? Someone with records and a turntable?" He said, "We can’t find anyone to do it." I said, "I think you just found the guy." I talked him into renting a set-up with speakers and a mixer, and it was a big hit.

There was another guy who ended up DJing at the food co-op with me for a couple years, and then through various political moves at the food co-op too diverse and stupid to go into, we both broke rank with the co-op management, and that was the end of that.

So I started promoting dances on my own, directly next door to the co-op, at a bicycle shop run by a bunch of Jamaican guys. Upstairs they had a low-rent dancehall-slash-catering hall, where the local Jamaican community would gather. The only way I advertised it was by putting flyers in the co-op, and I sent some notices to a show on WBAI called “Stormy Monday” that I really liked. They plugged my dances every once in a while. I got good turnouts, I had a lot of fun, I met some girls — which at that time was more important than money.

There’s the famous clip in the documentary Scratch when you describe your initial reaction to hearing hip-hop in a club for the first time…

Negril. The epiphany was just hearing it really, really loud, in a dark room with a lot of sweaty people dancing. That was like, "Holy shit — this is great." It was different from the Mudd Club, which had been my previous loud-dark-dancing experience. For one thing it was nothing but breaks. It’s one of those things — I’m one of those people who just likes listening to breaks. I just want to stay here and drink all evening!

Hip-hop didn’t have the same sociological freight to it, like now, or even a few years later. It was just disco with people yelling over it.

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There was this long period when it was, “Double Dee and Steinski…who?”

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How did you guys feel when you found out that you had won the Tommy Boy contest?

We submitted it on a cassette. We would call Tommy Boy every once in a while, and then we found out we won. What was really jaw dropping was when they said, "It was so obvious you guys were going to win. We knew it when the guys in the mailroom were screening them." The headline at Tommy Boy was essentially, “Old white guys win remix contest.”

What was the story behind “Lesson 2”?

We had both left our jobs by that point, and we were sharing this enormous apartment near Park Slope. We had designated this one alcove as the studio. I think we went in together and bought an eight-track and we had one or two two-track machines. We were joking around one day and said, "We should make a mix of James Brown’s greatest 'hunhs.'" This was before Fresh Gordon, Danny Krivit or Norman Cook. We just did it on a whim. It took like a month or two? We submitted it to Tommy Boy and that came out and it was so gratifying. There are all these people in the world dreaming of being onstage in a white leather fringed vest, and we just submitted this record and all of a sudden we were celebrities again. It was so effortless — it’s not because we were geniuses, we were just half-lucky and somewhat talented.

Did you have any sense that people were looking for your records?

At one point maybe 15 or 16 years ago, I took a few to a WFMU record sale. This was when the fair was still in the basement of a church. This Japanese kid appeared and said “I’ll take every one of them for 30 dollars.” “Thirty for the box?” “No, $30 each. There’s a picture of the label on the wall of a record store in Osaka.” I said, “You’re serious?” And he said, “Absolutely.”

There was this long period when it was, “Double Dee and Steinski…who?” Before [Cut] Chemist and [DJ] Shadow. There might have been guys like Prince Paul, who remembered us vaguely. It was more like: "This old white guy?"

What were you and Douglas doing? Did you hope to pursue music as a career?

We had completely dropped away. We didn’t keep on, like the Latin Rascals, doing edits and production and mixes. I went back to advertising and consulting, and Douglas went back to working in his studio. It didn’t seem like a reasonable thing at the time. My imagination was not so large that it could encompass, "Hey I’m going to quit advertising and go into music!" We got lucky a couple times, and there you go.

I’m lucky now because this is like depositing a dollar in the bank in the year 1200. I’m now weirdly famous. I can now have a fascinating and weird second career, rather than working at Home Depot.