Features

No Sleep ‘Til Bushwick: Daptone Records

Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings

If it’s been a long strange trip for Roth and Sugarman, then it’s also been a hard-fought one. A dedicated fanbase doesn’t necessarily guarantee an endless string of world tours, sold-out venues and super sessions. There’s always more work to be done, but the heavy lifting began well before Daptone came into existence.

Rewind to 1995. Roth, an undergrad in NYU’s Music Technology program, was soaking up everything he could about studio recording techniques, while Sugarman, on tenor saxophone, was fronting his own Sugarman 3 organ trio with Hammond B3 specialist Adam Scone and drummer Rudy Albin. (The latter cut his teeth with the legendary jazz organist Jack McDuff.) Enter soul aficionado Philip Lehman—an avowed crate digger and archivist with a label, Pure Records, devoted to rare funk reissues.

“A mutual friend hooked us up,” Roth remembers. “I had learned a little bit about engineering and arranging, and just for fun, we started making records. The first one we did was a fake kung fu film soundtrack called The Revenge of Mr. Mopoji. Little by little it all turned into a legitimate business. I never expected to be a record label owner, or even a serious musician. I just stumbled into it and one thing led to another.”

Roth and Lehman would eventually open a basement studio at 440 W. 41st St. in Manhattan, naming their new label Desco in honor of the vacuum cleaner store above them. “There was a guy named Frankie Inglese,” Sugarman continues, recalling his first contact with Desco. “He had a party called Soul Kitchen, and he told me, ‘Man, you gotta get in touch with Phillip Lehman. He’d be into what you’re doing.’ So I went to visit him and Gabe, and we hit it off pretty much immediately. There was a real scene around the label, and they were building a catalog of music that you could relate to. The next day we were like, ‘OK, when can we get in and record an album?’ That was the first Sugarman 3 record.”

Roth not only engineered the jazz-inflected Sugar’s Boogaloo, cementing Sugarman’s commitment to Desco, but nurtured the project from start to finish. Desco rolled out its releases exclusively on vinyl, usually accompanying them with 7-inch singles and B-sides that might have been left off the original album, making them fan-collectible pieces. Eye-catching cover art and packaging were also key elements of each LP—another nod of solidarity to vinyl junkies.

This winning formula would serve as a template for Daptone a few years later, but one Desco project in particular turned out to be the real harbinger of things to come. Shortly before Desco 440 Studios opened for business, Roth and Lehman had recorded an album with Lee Fields, a journeyman soul singer from North Carolina with a grit-and-nails voice. Fields had quietly been making albums since the late ‘60s, and had a song called “Meet Me Tonight” that became a minor hit in 1993. That song was stuck in Lehman’s mind when he tracked Fields down and offered to help him find a backing band.

“I felt like these guys had an idea but at the time, they were a bit green,” Fields observes. “They had more ambition than actual skills. Nowadays, of course, they got the skills, but it took a little while to get that together. But I saw what they had, and it was wonderful, man. I could understand later why they found me—because we had so much in common. They were the new generation of musicians, but they had the same vision I had—they wanted to make what they like, and I think that’s what still keeps everything tight. Daptone today is like a colorful, never-ending entity within itself, and as far as I’m concerned, I get another lift just from watching it grow.”

Soul Tequila, by the Soul Providers featuring Lee Fields, turned out to be as much of a milestone for Daptone as it was for Desco. It marked the beginning of a long-term working relationship with Fields and it featured a funky workout called “Switchblade,” which introduced the sassy attitude and delivery of Sharon Jones. “Gabe needed somebody to do background vocals,” Jones explains, looking back on her first session with the group that would gradually morph into the Dap-Kings. “My ex [tenor saxophonist Joe Hrbek] played with the horn section, so he was like, ‘Yo, my lady sings.’ They wanted three parts, so they asked if I knew any other singers, and I was like, ‘Well, I can do all three parts. Can you layer it down?’ So I went in and did ‘Switchblade’ and that was it. Close to a year later, they called me back to go to Europe, and we opened for Maceo Parker as Sharon Jones and the Soul Providers.”