eMusic Yearbook: 2007
There’s really no debating that 2007 will be remembered, first and foremost, as the year Radiohead gleefully suicide-bombed those last stubborn fragments of the old music industry and swept the smoldering remnants into the new millennium. That story has already been told several thousand times over, though, so let’s instead turn our attention to its polar opposite: Daptone Records, a tiny time-capsule studio and label in Brooklyn which channels the decades-gone glory days of R&B and soul, admirably without taking any steps whatsoever to modernize any of it. Run by aggressively old-school producer Gabriel Roth, known publicly by the pseudonym “Bosco Mann” when he’s playing bass with house band the Dap-Kings, Daptone serves as an outpost of old-soul music, recalling a time when labels like Stax and Motown would heavily invest in – and honestly believe in – artists like Isaac Hayes and the Spinners. Come to think of it, how many labels even have house bands at all anymore?
At Daptone, however, the Dap-Kings are a central figure in both the recordings and the label’s guiding mission. Roth is in high demand as a producer owing to his insistence on and aptitude for old analog recording technology – tape machines, plate reverbs, and a giant mixing console, all with nary a computer nor plug-in in sight. But the gospel he preaches has as much to do with the musicians as with the tools. Modern approaches to recording, he says, result in lifeless tunes where you’re more likely to hear Auto-Tune instead of a great singer. In a nutshell: don’t edit it, just play it properly – or else call it a night and go practice instead.
Nowhere is Daptone’s collective delight in bucking current trends by 40 years or so more evident than in their flagship artist Sharon Jones, a stocky singer in her 50s with a set of gunpowder-filled pipes that you have to hear to believe. Her 2007 album, 100 Days, 100 Nights, is the label’s most successful release to date, luring more rock listeners into blazing horn-section funk than any other record in the last decade.
But Daptone’s highest-profile project came that year from Amy Winehouse, the sultry singer and improbably beehived diva whose monster single “Rehab” would prove unpleasantly prophetic once she’d decided to spend the next few years (and counting) trying to out-train-wreck Britney Spears. Producer Mark Ronson enlisted Roth’s help to bring forth the album’s almost universally well-received vintage vibe, launching hits that were gloriously out of place on the year-end pop charts.
Considerably more at home was Jay-Z’s “Roc Boys,” the explosive American Gangster single that was hailed by Rolling Stone in late December as 2007′s best song. The rhymes are slick enough, but it’s the magnificent horn part, sampled from the Menahan Street Band’s “Make The Road By Walking,” written by Dap-Kings trumpet player Dave Guy and recorded in guitarist Tommy Brenneck’s bedroom, that really makes the tune. As Jay puts it at the end of the song: “This is black superhero music!”
All through 2007 Daptone kept the 45′s rolling out. Lee Fields ‘”Could Have Been” was a gorgeous lament about the perils of loving and losing. The song had more heart than you’d ever believe – most of it broken. Roth, naturally, adores it; “That’s one of my favorite vocal performances of my all time,” he gushed. “That’s one of my favorite things I’ve ever recorded. I slept good that night.” Also worthy of note is the solo release from Dap-Kings guitarist Binky Griptite – a Christmas record, if you can believe it. Roth laughed as he recalled it. “‘World Of Love ‘I really dig because he really went all the way,” he said. “It’s more Christmas-y than Christmas, so it’s kind of hard to hate on.”
Unbelievable as it may seem, though, both Lee and Bink are soundly thrashed, in terms of sheer warm fuzzies, by “If This World Were Mine,” the hybrid debut/reissue by the almost totally unmarketable brother duo Bob and Gene. The pair make for what’s probably the most heartwarming back-story anywhere in Daptone’s history. In 1967, Buffalo, NY factory worker William Nunn started an independent label and built a basement studio for his teenage sons, both aspiring singers, who were 15 and 17. The project’s coffers ran dry, however, before anything could be done with the master tapes, so they just sat on a shelf until Roth stumbled across them a few years back and decided to finally drive the album home. “Something about kids that age singing love songs,” he offered, “You can call it naive, but as a kid, it’s just that endless, unrequited love, that Romeo and Juliet shit. There’s no plan B when you’re 15.”
But by far the most rewarding Daptone album of that year was the second eponymous release from Staten Island Afrobeat-fusion mob the Budos Band. “They’re pretty rock and roll, man,” Roth told me. “As far as the Daptone crew, the Budos Band are kind of the bad boys. They definitely do their share of drinking and throwing up and getting into trouble on the road.” And, er, in the studio: “They’d show up late – nine or ten at night – and start drinking. By one or two in the morning they’d be shitfaced and couldn’t play anymore,” he continued. “But even then, in three or four days we had the whole record. They write all their own songs, and they know what they want to sound like, so they just come in and we roll tape.” Sober or not, Budos II is a totally exceptional set of badass instrumental jams where sparks fly every time the horns collide with the drums. It seems destined to end up as either the subject of another sampling lawsuit or the soundtrack during a Tarantino chase sequence.
As both the backdrop to some of the year’s biggest smashes and quietly confident shepherd of their own artists, Daptone owned 2007 about as far as any small label could reasonably hope to. They may still be a few decades away from the immortal acclaim of Stax and Motown, but if it’s any consolation, all of their music, including the 2007 milestones, will surely still be available when it comes time to canonize. That – sorry, Gabe – is one of the benefits of going digital.
