Daptone, Home Grown: Gabe Roth’s Cottage Industry of Soul

November 11th, 2010 by Justin Colletti

Much of America is familiar with Gabe Roth’s authentic heavy-soul sensibilities from his Grammy-winning work behind the glass with Amy Winehouse. Despite this blockbuster success and continued work with major label artists, it’s the homegrown label Daptone Records that may prove to be his most enduring legacy.

Gabe Roth: musician, songwriter, engineer/producer and co-founder of Daptone Records. Photo by Jacob Blickenstaff.

Since co-founding Daptone in 2002, Gabe has shaped the label through his indispensable roles as producer, songwriter and player. Favoring techniques and textures that had been largely abandoned for generations, Gabe’s uncompromising vision has helped show there’s plenty of demand in today’s economy for a leaner, localized model of music-making.

This Brooklyn-based family of artists operates as a kind of cottage-industry, reminiscent of old studio/label hybrids like Stax, Sun, or the early days of Motown.

Although he instantly won over his interviewers with mellow confidence and genuine humility, make no mistake: Gabe proves unafraid of expressing strongly formed opinions on what’s really important, and what forces drive independent, sustainable success in the world of music.

With Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings and Budos Band on the road supporting new releases, we caught up with Gabe as he holed up in anticipation of the birth of his second daughter. We took advantage of his bird’s eye view of the entire process to talk business, process and inspiration. This article is a little longer than our standard Q&A, but it’s worth it. Your brain, soul, (and career) will thank you.

Daptone experienced impressive growth while the old guard of major record labels and terrestrial radio were seeing their biggest losses. Although dwindling CD sales and big studio closures have made some of the loudest voices in the industry nervous, you’ve gone on record with some positive statements about the changing music business. Can you tell us more?

Even though you hear a lot about Virgin and Tower closing, or CD sales going down, you’ve never met so many people with so much music! If you talk to independent bands and labels I think you’ll hear they’re having an easier time finding their niche and making a living now than they used to.

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It also forced us into this world where musicians were pinning everything on a dream. You really felt like you needed a major record label to give you a deal and get behind you, or you had nothing. There was only this one level of success, a pretty stellar one, which just wasn’t realistic. It’s like when every 13-year-old in the country thinks they’re gonna play in the NBA someday. Sure, that’s cool when you’re 13, but it’s no way to make a living!

Thankfully, a lot of that has broken down. The internet has made it possible for a little band from Bogota or Detroit to sell music directly to a fan in Switzerland. At the same time, a local band has a chance of getting some good press in their own hometown. The amount of access is just unbelievable right now.

That’s true. On the other hand, there’s also a lot of noise out there and it can be an obstacle for new artists who are looking to gain credibility with new fans. What were some of the best routes for people to get hip to Daptone and Sharon Jones in the beginning?

Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings. Photo by: Laura Hanifin.

Well, no matter what changes, the biggest thing for us is and has always been touring. I think the strongest asset that Sharon, the Dap Kings, and the whole label has is a great live show.

Whether or not people are blown away by our records, it seems people tend to be blown away by our live show. I think it’s really distinctive in the level of energy, showmanship, musicality and soulfulness you hear. There aren’t a lot of shows like it out there right now. That’s what gets people talking.

I can vouch for that. The first time I saw you guys play was at Maxwell’s in Hoboken, back in 2002 or so. It was a memorable performance, and it was refreshing to see an audience that was so engaged.

Yeah, playing a show like that, you really connect to people in a direct way. When you look at people right in the eye and they’re sweating and dancing and cussing and laughing and shaking right along with you? Those are really important connections.

On a quantity level, we’re connecting with fewer people at a time than say Christina Aguilera does when she shoots a commercial for Pepsi. Someone like that might be connecting with more people, but the connections she makes are very different.

When you show up at a small venue like Maxwell’s or anywhere else, and somebody tells you after the show that his girlfriend just dumped him, but that he had a great time and feels a lot better because Sharon [Jones] danced with him out in the crowd? Those are lifelong connections. They’re not based on what’s on the radio or what’s on your friend’s lunchbox. They’re based on really direct connections between people and the music.

So you believe in the power of making fewer, stronger connections? It’s not surprising that you can build a pretty vocal following that way without a ton of airplay or major media support.

Exactly. Through perseverance, playing shows, and having people tell their friends, you can do a lot.

We’ve played all over the world in little towns. The first time we’d go there’d be twenty people, and then fifty. The next time it would be a hundred, two hundred and five hundred until now when it’s two thousand or more. It’s been very organic, and the strongest thing has always been people talking to people.

There’s definitely been a couple things, promotion-wise that have helped us along the way too. Doing “Fresh Air” with Teri Gross was huge. I think it’s amazing, people really listen to and respect that stuff, so it means a lot.

I know your bands are playing some larger venues now. I wonder if there are any challenges in translating the act to a bigger stage. Are you tempted to go big 70s Motown? Where does it change and where does it stay the same?

Recording in Daptone Studio, Brooklyn. Photo by: Jacob Blickenstaff.

There are definitely some changes. We’re adapting our act from what started as a real sweaty club act, and lately most of our shows tend to be in big 1-2,000 seat venues or big festivals. It’s a different type of show, visually. You have to make it a little more spectacular in that way, but at the end of it, Sharon’s energy and the energy of the band tends to fill those spaces up nicely.

We experiment a bit, but for the most part it’s a lot of the same music we’d play at smaller venues. We try to stay true to what got us where we are, which is just directly interacting with the audience and laying down really strong music. There’s definitely been a handful of really big shows where we’ve augmented the band and brought in string sections, tympanis, organs or vibraphones and things like that. When we get to do that it’s been fun and definitely brings the show to another level.

Can you still get sweaty with tympanis and strings on stage?

Yeah! (laughs) Definitely can. There are other ways we can bring up the level too. This year we’re hoping to get some more of the Daptone singers and acts and stuff on the bill to make it more of a Soul Revue and give people a little more for their money.

One of the things I learned that I think is really interesting: Watching these really iconic amazing old James Brown shows, I noticed that he seems does two kinds of songs: these dripping slow ballads, and these burning-fast, killer, up-tempo funk things. A lot of the excitement is in the dynamics. It’s in him jumping back and forth between quiet and loud, slow and fast, and that’s something we’re always working within our show.

One of the challenges for us is that we love playing a lot of these powerful mid-tempo tunes. Since a lot of our songs are kind of in that range and we have to figure out the right way to finesse them into the set to keep things kind of spectacular.

That’s something you seem to have been able to balance on the records well so far: Progressively adding some sheen while staying true to the rawness and process you’ve designed for yourselves. How has the technology and process developed from the first Sharon Jones record, Dap Dippin’ which is very raw, and I Learned the Hard Way which is in the same family of sound, but sounds a bit more dressed up?

Gabe Roth on the Trident console at Daptone Studio. Photo by: Jacob Blickenstaff.

On the technical side, they’re both done on 8-track machines. Dap Dippin’ was done on a 1/2″ and I Learned the Hard Way was done on a 1″ machine, but there’s definitely a number of differences elsewhere.

Dap Dippin’ was recorded in a basement, so there’s a lot of frequency stuff on that record that, looking back on it, sounds real cappy and midrangey, but I think had a lot to do with being in a concrete room. There’s only so much of that you can EQ out! The studio is better, and there was a learning curve for me when it came to sound and engineering, but I think some of the biggest differences came from the evolution of the band…

Back then, it wasn’t really a band yet. At that point it was just my little project. The guys kinda just came in, played great and left. When you talk about I Learned the Hard Way, you’re talking about guys who’ve been on the road for 10 or 15 years, playing together every night.

You hear it in the caliber of musicianship, the way the horn section vibrates together, and the way the rhythm section bubbles together. It doesn’t have anything to do with professionalism. It has to do with dudes riding together in a van for years, breathing the same air, laughing at the same jokes and listening to the same mixtapes. There’s something about that that can really make a band gel musically.

The last big difference is that on this last record we made some real strides arrangement-wise. There’s more discipline in it, and more space. There are a lot of songs that were built and arranged from the ground up, way before we even got in to the studio. I think that’s different from the very first records where the approach was kind of just putting parts on top of other parts.

It sounds like you have some reservations about the sound of the earliest records, but I think they still hold up. Is there a particular time when you really hit your stride and developed confidence as a producer, or was it always there?

Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings released "I Learned The Hard Way" in the Spring, 2010.

I think part of any success I’ve had is that I never really had a lot of aspirations as a musician or as a producer, so I didn’t really put a lot of weight on myself when I was starting out.

I mean, Dap Dippin’ was me in a basement, screwing around like a lot of people do, trying to make something we could sell on the road to make some merch money. I think one of the reasons we’ve had success is we haven’t succumbed to any kind of outside pressure telling us whether or not we’re doing a good job. We just kind of stay true to our own ears, you know?

Neil [Sugarman, Daptone co-founder] and me, Nydia [Davila, Daptone’s Project & Sales Manager] and Sharon, everyone in the band, we just hash it out and fight to make a record that sounds good to us.

We have a lot of faith and confidence in that process, and I think it’s paid off for us. We’ve never really put out a big pop record of our own or anything, but these last couple albums have broke 100,000 copies, which is huge for an independent record. In a certain way, we take it as a vote of confidence to keep doing what we’re doing. It looks like people are gonna buy the records so we try not to get too hung up on it.

The Daptone label wears its heritage on its sleeve, but I’ve never imagined you as the Quentin Tarantino type, specifically referencing earlier records. How do you feel about the “retro” classification?

I think the ends and means get a little confused there sometimes. A lot of people see what we’re doing in a retro context, and I think people sometimes misunderstand where we’re coming from on that. It’s not that we’re trying to remake records from the 60s, the same way they made them back then, and that’s why they feel good. It’s kind of the opposite: We try to make records that feel good now, and they end up sounding more like the records from the 60s than what’s on the radio now. You know what I mean? (laughs)

You’re also known for using vintage equipment and helping keep pockets of the industry excited about the sound and benefits of recording to tape. How do you feel about being a noted ambassador of old-school technology?

There’s a lot of hype about tube gear and tape machines and stuff, and even analog recording. As much as I tend to get lumped into that school I’m really not that dogmatic about it. If something sounds better or feels better on a computer, go ahead and use a computer!

We do a lot of blind A/B-ing in the studio. You need to do it blind in order to overcome so many biases that you have. If you spent $4,000 on some old microphone, then you really want it to sound good. But if you put it blind up against an SM57, sometimes the SM57’s gonna win, but you’re never gonna know unless you do it blind. So, we do a lot of that, and we do end up using a lot of radio shack mics and common mics too.

It’s definitely interesting when you see a nerdy internet column about what kind of mics they were using on sessions for the Beatles or at Motown or something, because I think it’s really not all that useful. At the end of the day, if you wanna know how they made a John Lennon vocal sound amazing, the answer is that John Lennon was singing! If you want to know why the Motown rhythm section sounds like that, it’s because it’s those dudes playing. We’re pretty in touch with that, so I try not to pay too much attention to that kind of fetishism.

You hear so much about the way to mic a guitar amp. You know: “Put two mics on it, and one mic behind it, and one mic out-of-phase…” But to be honest, I’ve never found anything that has drastically changed the tone of the guitar amp. Changing the amp, that would make a difference. If you have a good guitar player, that’s the number one thing. They have the tone. A good player with a good guitar and a good amp? Who cares what mic you use! I tend to use a SM57, but the point of that is I think there’s a lot of fetishism in recording and most of the time it doesn’t help.

That’s true, so much of production happens before the sound hits a microphone. I know you put most of your emphasis on the music happening in the room, but what about the recording technique side? Do you have any rules or guidelines?

Sharon and Gabe breaking it down in the studio. Photo by Jacob Blickenstaff.

Every time we go in, we a do a lot of experimentation. I don’t think we ever really have it figured out, like “This is the mic for the drums and this is where we put it.” A lot of people ask me: “Where do you put the mic on the drums?” and I say “Man, I don’t know!” On a Tuesday it’ll work one way and on a Wednesday it will work another way. We just try to really listen and move things around until they sound good and kind of trust our ears.

For me as a producer, I’m definitely learning every day. I think the day I think I have it all figured out is the day I’m probably really going downhill.

Of course on the other hand: yes we use tape machines: I splice stuff with a razor blade. We use a lot of ribbon mics and older gear and tube stuff. But, there are transistor amps we use when they have the right sound, and our mixing board is from the 80s. For us, it’s not about the “idea” of any those things. It’s about what they actually sound like from testing blind. Does that make sense?

Definitely. You do seem to have a more principled stance on track count though. Can you tell us a little more about that?

Oh yeah, the 8-track is much more important for the way we do things. What a lot of people see as the limitations of the machine, I see as an advantage.

With an 8-track, you can’t go back later and say “The trumpet’s out of tune, let’s recut it.” The trumpet is on the same microphone and the same track as everybody else! That means the trumpet player has to play it right, and the producer has to stop in the middle of the take to say “Hey man, you’re out of tune, let’s try this again.”

If the blend between the instruments is wrong, or if the arrangement isn’t working, you have to get that when it’s going down. “What if the Bari doesn’t play in the chorus?” You can’t wait for the mix.

The thing about recording with 8 tracks is that it pushes everybody to do a better job. It obliges the musicians and the producer and the arranger to do better work. They’re all decisions that have to be made eventually anyway. I believe in leaving those decisions to the people who should be making them, rather than leaving it to a mixing engineer later on.

That method seems to be pretty central to the way these records feel. Changing gears a bit, let’s talk about some of the content. One of my favorite records from your catalog is the third SJDK album, 100 Days, 100 Nights. It almost feels like the story of one relationship through time. Was there a theme when you were writing this record?

Sharon Jones. Photo by: Steven Dewall

I don’t think there was. When you’re sequencing a record, you’re definitely putting things together in a certain order, maybe picking certain songs that work together lyrically.

What’s it like writing for a female singer?

Sharon’s really great at singing empowered songs. Those are songs that are easy for her to connect with: “You’re gone, but f* you, I’m living my life anyway.” (laughs) That kind of empowerment and strength is something that she’s really good at inspiring in people.

As far as the personal nature of writing for her, remember it’s not like writing for a stranger. I’ve worked with Sharon and written with her for years. We’ve been on the road. I know her stories, and she knows mine. We might write a song about something that happened to the guitar player. We may switch a “he” to a “she,” but she can connect with it because she knows what happened.

Songs that work are the ones people can identify with. There’s something simple and human about them. I don’t want to call our songs great, because the songs we write aren’t genius compositions with brilliant Bob Dylan lyrics. But, I think all the great soul songs are like that. They’re simple, and there’s something human about them. Everybody gets heartbroken, everybody gets hungry. Being able to write about those things, keeping it real, is very satisfying.

When we’re writing about those kinds of things, we’re writing about things we know Sharon is going to connect to. She can’t really phone it in. Whenever she tries to sing about something that she doesn’t really feel, it comes across that way.

You’ve said that you’re trying to make records that feel good now, rather than trying to specifically model older records. What about the business model? Did you look to the example of older local label/studio hybrids, or was it a modern solution to a modern problem?

It’s definitely the latter. Starting a label was the alternative to signing with a label we didn’t want to sign with. So the idea was artists creating the kind of label that feels right.

Business-wise, Motown was like a huge empire, and I think the artists were a much smaller part of it business wise. At Stax I think there was a lot more input and it was a much closer family, but even at the end of that they ended getting ripped off a little bit by Atlantic or Jim Stewart event. For us it was important to try to create a situation that’s going to try to be fair to the artists, something that everybody’s going to feel good about. People are going to feel good making records like that. We just try to keep stuff straight and try to treat all the artists the way we want to be treated as artists.

Do you ever work on non-Daptone artists in your studio?

It’s definitely made for in-house music, but we produce a lot of stuff there for other people. Obviously we did the Amy Winehouse record there, we did the Daniel Merriweather there, we’ve done a lot of Michael Bublé records there, you know, we’ve been hired a lot of times by major labels and artists to do their music for them. We don’t do it a lot but it can be fun sometimes.

But of course, as far as our own stuff, we’ve recorded a lot of things in there that just haven’t come out because we didn’t think they were great. There’s several albums worth of songs, for a lot of our artists that didn’t come out. The Naomi Shelton album — the one that came out — was really the 3rd record we recorded with them. I finally felt like we got it right and made a record I was really proud of, and that’s the one that came out. The other ones are sitting on the shelf, you know?

Sometimes knowing what not to put out is a big part of making good art.

Right. We have a reputation for having a lot of integrity and putting out real high quality records and paying attention to every detail, whether it’s the fadeout on every tune or the spacing between the letters on the cover. We spend a lot of time with these records. It’s all done in house and by hand so because of that we have a lot to lose by putting out anything that isn’t great. There’s a lot of people who will go out and buy the 45s we’re releasing, just because of the name on it.

There’s also stuff we don’t release just because we can’t fit it on the record. There are so many unreleased masters just from the I Learned The Hard Way sessions. We recorded over 20 songs for those sessions and there’s something like 12 on the album. We wanted to make a 40-minute, not 80-minute record, because I just think that’s a little more digestable.

Hopefully we’ll be able to get some of the good stuff out there, and we try to find new ways to do it. For the holiday season we’re doing a box set of the ILHW record that has the whole album as a series of 45s with a photolog of the making of the record. That kind of thing allows us a vehicle to put out some of the stuff we wish we could have.

Budos Band. Photo by Kisha Bari.

Tell us a bit about the Budos Band. They’re really impressive musicians with a unique set of influences, but they don’t seem get as much press as some of the other artists on the roster. They’ve got a new album out that’s heavy, daring and has some striking moments on it. Can you tell us some more about them?

They’re a real asset to the label. I think they’re kind of like Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings’s mischievous little brothers or something. There was recently a great article on them where the reviewer said “If Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings are the heart of soul revival, then the Budos Band are the balls.” (laughs) We really liked that one.

They’re coming from a real raw place. They’re steeped in all this afrobeat and funk music they’ve played with us over the years, but a lot of these guys come from a background of loving this really heavy, crazy, demon-guitar stuff. It sounds like a weird combo, but they have something in common with our musical philosophy, which is a certain idea that nobody is playing to prove their worth as a musician.

They’re playing to try to make people dance and try to make people feel something. They’re very in touch with that, and they’re not afraid of playing something stupid if it’s gonna move somebody.

By the time we got to this third record, they kind of had their own sound. They’d been influenced by the Ethiopian stuff, the Nigerian stuff, and Funk, but they put together their own sound and they knew exactly what they wanted to sound like. It made this last record really easy. They recorded the whole album in two days. They worked out the songs and we went in there and cut it all live. No overdubs, nothing, that was it. There may have been one solo we fixed, or a couple of edits where we took out the razorblade to save a beautiful take, but for the most part it was all live.

That’s impressive, but I think it’s important that you qualify that, especially for new bands: How much prep time goes in to those two days? Before the tapes even start to roll?

Daptone released "Budos III" in August, 2010.

That’s a good question. It was a lot. They worked out all this music far beforehand. They wanted to record months earlier, but the fact that we pay so much attention to every detail of each album means Daptone can only release a couple of records per year. So they kind of had to wait in line to get this record made.

That can be frustrating for the artists, but because of it they came in very prepared. They had a whole bunch of songs written that they’d been playing on the road, and a few new ones. Even on the arrangements, I didn’t have as much input this time around because they were already so hooked up and together.

And of course it wasn’t just writing those songs that prepared them for making a record like this. It was having a career, and two earlier albums where they had really carved out a sound for themselves.

How has their sound evolved over time?

Sometimes a band will come out with a really strong unique sound, and by the third or fourth record they want to be real geniuses and reinvent themselves in every way. But these guys, to their credit I think, didn’t do that. They stood their ground and made a record that said “This is what we do well and if you didn’t like Budos Band II, you’re going to hate Budos Band III!” (laughs). It came out really strong, and I think it’s their best record yet. – Justin Colletti

Check out Budos Band III, Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings and the entire Daptones roster over at http://www.daptonerecords.com. Follow Daptone on Twitter @DaptoneRecords. And catch an upcoming show: Ring in the New Year with Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings December 30 and 31 at the Best Buy Theater, Times Square NYC; and see the Budos Band December 3 at The Bowery Ballroom.

Justin Colletti is a Brooklyn-based audio engineer and music producer who’s worked with Hotels, DeLeon, Soundpool, Team Genius and Monocle, as well as clients such as Nintendo, JDub and Blue Note Records. Visit him at http://www.justincolletti.com.

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Daptone, Home Grown: Gabe Roth’s Cottage Industry of Soul

5 Comments on Daptone, Home Grown: Gabe Roth’s Cottage Industry of Soul

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5 Comments on Daptone, Home Grown: Gabe Roth’s Cottage Industry of Soul

Vaughan Merrick

Lucas Van Lenten