‘I can’t stop DJing,’ Mark Ronson says — never mind the back pain

Grammy and Oscar-winning music producer Mark Ronson says nothing compares to the rush he feels when he puts on a song that transforms the room. Ronson was 10 years old, and celebrating the wedding of his mother and his stepfather, when he first felt it.

It was a small wedding, in the garden of a summer rental, and the music had stalled. Ronson’s new stepfather, Foreigner guitarist Mick Jones suggested that Ronson — a self-described “kid obsessed with music” — find a song to put on. He chose Eric Clapton‘s “Wonderful Tonight.”

“And I remember standing inside the house looking through the window as my stepdad pulls my mom in for a slow dance,” Ronson says. “And I just stood there watching the scene, slightly drunk off this feeling of like, ‘Oh my God, this is my music playing out there.’ But also it was … like the first time in my life I genuinely have a memory of having done something right.”

Ronson spent his teenage years yearning to be a musician. He played guitar in a band, but he became frustrated by what he describes as a lack of technical ability. “Everyone [was] kind of shooting past me. And I started to have this realization … if I want to be in music, I might have to find my own lane,” he says.

When he was 18, Ronson began DJing in the clubs of New York City. In the new memoir, Night People: How to Be a DJ in ’90s New York City, Ronson reflects on the 1990s club scene and his journey to becoming a music producer. He’s gone on to work with some of the biggest names in pop, including Amy Winehouse, Bruno Mars, Lady Gaga and more.

I used to be … dialing the dealer on the way out of the club, and now I’m making an appointment with my acupuncturist online as I’m leaving the club because my back is just so jacked.

Mark Ronson

In the decades since he started, music has been digitized and DJs no longer have to haul around crates of albums for each gig. But Ronson remains nostalgic for the old sound; recently he began spinning records in a few clubs in Brooklyn and Manhattan.

“It really has been this joyous restart of my love for DJing,” he says. But, he adds, “Carrying those records around is insane. … I used to be … dialing the dealer on the way out of the club, and now I’m making an appointment with my acupuncturist online as I’m leaving the club because my back is just so jacked.”

Interview highlights

On his early days of DJing and the difficulty of getting access to rare records and samples

There was one guy at my college, this DJ record collector … I would just go to his room. He was a senior and I was a freshman and I’d be sitting outside his dorm and waiting for him to open the door so I could come and listen to some of these records. … I had to spend the first month at college proving my worth and trustworthiness to him. … The access to it was so slim and you had to kind of befriend people who had the records and then prove yourself as a genuine music appreciator. Of course I love it because it made everything so sacred, but it’s ridiculous now to think you could just go to WhoSampled and you would find out what the thing was and you would immediately go to Spotify or YouTube.

On lugging crates of records to gigs

The standard that I would take on any given night was probably three crates with a hundred records each and maybe, like, a giant, bursting bag because you’re taking old-school disco and classics, old-school hip-hop, new-school hip-pop, R&B, reggae, a little bit of house music. So if you’re doing a four- or five-hour set, which is what we’re doing most nights, that’s what you’re bringing. … So you had broken a sweat before you’re even in the cab on the way to the club.

On how DJing for 25 years is hard on your body

I only found out two years ago that I have this crazy arthritis in my right foot … The doctor, when I went in, he was like, “Oh, I watched a YouTube video of you. I noticed you kind of, like, really aggressively tap your foot while you’re DJing.” And I had never thought about this because you’re just tapping to the beat. … So I named it “DJ Foot.” … I’m not proud of any of this, but [I have] terrible tinnitus. My back is completely messed up from 25 years of headphones on. You’ve got your neck crooked to one side.

On wordplay mixes

Whenever you do one of those mixes, we used to call them “wordplay mixes,” where you go from [a] line in one song, there’s a line in Snoop‘s “Gin and Juice” where he goes “they ain’t leaving until 6 in the morning,” and then on “6 in the morning,” go right into Nas, “Oochie Wally,” because he’s referenced that song. So “they ain’t leaving until 6 in the morning” is now Nas. So you’ve just done this slick on beat transition from Snoop to Nas. And of course, it takes a half second for the brain to realize, but it’s still on beat. And you just get this crazy blowback, this charge from the crowd all going like, “Oh!” at the same time, you can call it the scream, the chant, whatever it is. It’s like clay or Play-Doh, like the whole crowd is this thing that you’re able to mold together. It’s incredible. It’s kind of why I can’t stop DJing. It’s still a feeling that I only get from this one thing, no matter what else I do in my work as a producer.

On how his family background, resources and connections opened doors for him as as DJ

Of course, when I started off DJing, coming from this nice family uptown with a stepdad who was a rock star and my mom who was just like larger than life. She was out in the parties, out in this scene in New York, amazing rock-and-roll artist mom. I was horribly embarrassed of all of it, but it’s probably more in a teenage way when you’re just like, “Oh mom, like do you have to come to the club when I’m DJing?” Meanwhile, everybody thought it was the coolest thing that my mom came to these hole-in-the-wall basements and clubs. … Yes, I did have advantages that other people really didn’t have, of course. My mom bought me the turntables for graduation. I had a stepdad who was a musician who nurtured what I wanted to do as a kid. So I had to really deal with that and address that really out in the open in the book because of course I had advantages and stuff like that. But I also worked my ass off, and that’s kind of like the two sides of the book.

On listening and understanding being a major part of producing

I realized I wasn’t the most important person in the equation and actually, and I still hold that to this day. Like if I’m working with an artist, you know, of course, if I have an idea I feel passionate about, I’m gonna fight for it. But they’re the one that has to go around singing that for the next two years or maybe the rest of their life. So it’s like, OK, at the end I will make that artist the final say. … But to be honest, like growing up in a family of 10 siblings and sort of like constantly practicing diplomacy or whatever the hell it was, I think that my childhood made me a good listener and understander and that’s an important tool for a music producer.

Sam Briger and Anna Bauman produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.