For decades, pioneering sonic collagist Steve "Steinski" Stein has led a curious double life: mild-mannered adman by day, hip-hop legend by night. Along with longtime former partner Doug "Double Dee" DiFranco, Steinski recorded a series of wildly influential sonic pastiches collectively known as "Lessons," beginning with a remix of "Play That Beat, Mr. DJ" that won a remix contest sponsored by legendary hip-hop label Tommy Boy.
Steinski and Double Dee's revolutionary mixes combined hip-hop grooves with a mind-bendingly eclectic array of sound bites and left-field samples from across the pop-culture spectrum, from old commercials to Groucho Marx one-liners. Though the sheer number of recognizable samples made legal releases prohibitively expensive, the mixes quickly developed a devoted underground following, especially among DJs and instrumentalists. Cut Chemist and DJ Shadow paid Steinski the ultimate homage by recording "Lessons" of their own, and Madlib gave Steinski a vocal cameo on Shades Of Blue, his Blue Note tribute/remix album. Steinski appeared in the seminal 2001 DJ documentary Scratch and is increasingly acknowledged as an important influence on multiple generations of beat junkies, collagists, and crate-diggers. This year witnessed another milestone in Steinski's career: the release of Illegal Arts' achingly essential two-disc compilation What Does It All Mean?1983-2006 Retrospective. The A.V. Club recently spoke with the unlikely hip-hop godfather about selling drugs, advertising, being a sonic outlaw, and finding the humor in the Kennedy assassination.
"The Payoff Mix" by Steinski
The A.V. Club: The liner notes for What Does It All Mean? discuss how you used innovative marketing techniques to sell drugs in college. Could you talk a little about that?
Steinski: What happened was that the school I went to, Franconia College, was a tiny little college in New Hampshire. I'm not sure whether the enrollment was ever more than 400 people, and it was located in an old vacation hotel up in the mountains in northern New Hampshire. Fantastic place. In the early '70s, it existed as an almost fully accredited school where you could go and not be in the army. So it got a lot of interesting people who were more interested in not being in the army than in getting a traditional education. It was one of those schools where you could choose your own electives, set your own curriculum, and then cut all the classes.
AVC: Did they offer classes in draft-dodging?
S: No, you didn't need that, man, because if you were there, it was de facto you were out. It was a pretty great place—it was very, very hipster-oriented. I remember when I got there, I was told that there was a union of dope dealers called the Space Patrol. I think in its 10 years of existence, the school had graduated perhaps 70 people. It had enormous turnover, because people would come through, drop out, move on, go do something else, leave the country. It was as much a way station as it was anything else. When I got there, the Space Patrol was no longer in existence. Although there were still things like "welcome to the school" parties with punch bowls full of murky liquid that could kill an elephant. People would drink this stuff, not knowing what was going on, and then spend three days lying in their beds, raving and seeing things. After a while, some friends of mine and I got together and decided, just sort of as a lark—not because we were such great business people—to sell some weed. Everybody and their brother sold weed. It was that sort of time in the world and the United States, and very much at this school. You'd come back from vacation with half a pound of something you had bought from somebody back home.
What we'd do is call ourselves Junior Achievement, thereby pre-dating Tom Cruise in Risky Business by quite a while. We gave out premiums to people, we had parties in my room where you could come and try it for nothing, and just the idea that there was—like in any branding experiment—when there's something, if you're up against nothing, people tend to gravitate toward something, for the most part. So there we were, Junior Achievement, as the successors to the Space Patrol. We did pretty well, actually. Didn't handle anything that hurt anybody, and sold to just about everybody, which was kind of a problem there. At one point, one of the people in the school management took me aside and went "You know, Steve, perhaps you ought to tone it down just a little." That was good advice. So we basically dissolved the business after a year or so, but it was great fun while it lasted, and we made some money.
AVC: It mentions in the liner notes that you put an ad in the student paper.
S: Well, the student paper, you have to imagine what the student paper was like. The personals column had hate mail toward the people who owned cars that drove too close to the side of the road. It was a pretty lunatic paper to begin with. But, yes, we had ads touting Junior Achievement. And we never had to say what it was, because everybody knew.
AVC: A "wink, wink, nudge, nudge" sort of situation?
S: More or less. In a school that small, you didn't even need "wink, wink, nudge, nudge." It was just sort of like "Okay, yeah, oh sure, cool, excellent."
AVC: What sort of music were you into back then?
S: Oh, goodness. I guess rock, folk, some funk. I didn't categorize it too much in my head; I listened to a lot of Grateful Dead. It was a hippie school—we listened to hippie music. I don't really listen to Grateful Dead that much any more, but I listen to it occasionally. I'm trying to think what else. I remember the two Stones records at that time. The one with "Brown Sugar" on it and Exile On Main St. were huge up there. Huge. Also, in my dorm, we were seriously into Miles Davis. We used to play Jack Johnson on a stereo that we took out into the common area. The dorm really loved that. I was getting into jazz a lot at that time, too.
AVC: How did you segue from being a college drug dealer to working in advertising?
S: [Laughs.] Not that far a leap. Let's see. There was a lot in between. I dropped out of school and moved to West Virginia, where I was a public park supervisor and me and my girlfriend and a couple of friends lived in a shack that did not have running water, didn't have an indoor toilet. For heat, we dug coal out of the hillside and burnt it in our pot-bellied stove. For a city boy, I have to say I gave country living about as much of a run as I could. It was a very rural part of West Virginia that we were living in, so being Jewish was a wild novelty. I eventually moved back to Philadelphia, where my wife is from and where I had lived previously in college. Before I went up to this nutty place up in New Hampshire, I went to Temple University, which didn't last long at all. I ended up working at Gimbels in Philadelphia, in their advertising department. And then when my girlfriend and I got married and we moved to New York, I wound up working in advertising in New York. Back then, I was very enthusiastic about it. It was really interesting to me, it was something I wanted to learn more about and be involved in. It seemed like a great industry. After six or seven years of being involved in it, my initial rapture had pretty much worn away. Most of the people I worked with were pretty shallow, unpleasant people. The skill itself, while it was very interesting and has wound up being valuable to me all my life, once I learned it, exercising it in a large agency context was pretty boring.
AVC: Was there any advertising that you created that particularly stands out in your mind?
S: I still work in advertising, but it's not like there's any one thing in terms of advertising that I would point to and go "Oh yeah, I'm real proud of that." Fuck no, that's why I got out of it as a staff job.
AVC: Have you watched the show Mad Men?
S: You know, I don't have television. I haven't watched television for 25 years.
AVC: Why?
S: Well, it's a little like being an alcoholic and joining AA. I'm so susceptible to having my attention being hooked by it that it's better if I don't fuck with it. I think the last time I watched TV was for two or three hours on Sept. 11. It's not like I walk around in a sheet with a sign saying "Don't watch television," because that would be pretty stupid. It's just for me, it's better not to watch television. I have more time to read.
AVC: That's surprising, since your work is so saturated in pop culture.
S: I guess I'm really lucky in some ways. I'm a quick study when it comes to popular culture, so I can use things and not appear to be too out of it. This was a problem with the advertising industry, because I stopped watching television before I stopped working at the advertising agency. I remember at one point, back when Atari was really hot shit, I was working on Atari as one of the writers. A guy walked into my office and said "Listen, I got this really great idea for a campaign—we'll use Mr. T." I said "Who?" He went "I knew it," pulled out a copy of Time that had Mr. T on the cover, and said "Here, read this shit and then we'll do the campaign." It was like he knew I wasn't going to know who Mr. T was. I was really lucky that people accommodated to my little eccentricity.
AVC: Did you end up using Mr. T?
S: I think it was probably proposed, and they certainly had the money to do it, but for some reason or other, that didn't happen.
AVC: Throughout the '70s, hip-hop was an underground thing. Did you have any experience with it then, in the pre-"Rapper's Delight" age?
S: Gosh, I wish. In the pre-record age, I was not aware of it. I became aware of hip-hop when Deborah Harry and Chris Stein played some on the radio on a station in New York where they were guest DJs. I happened, by mistake, to tape the show, and when I went back and listened to it, I was absolutely galvanized. That's when I started getting into hip-hop. There were a couple of records out at that time, and I bought almost every one I could get hold of. At that point, everyone I played it for was absolutely repulsed. "Oh, this is awful, don't you know that?" Gosh, no. It didn't make me not love hip-hop; it just made me stop playing it for other people.
AVC: In the early days, there was a sense that it was a novelty, a fad.
S: There was definitely a feeling of that. "This is music for impoverished people and whatnot, and this ain't gonna fly."
AVC: What was your first hip-hop show? What was your first engagement with the culture?
S: First time, I went to Negril, which was this tiny little bar on 2nd Avenue that Cool Lady Blue had a once-a-week party at. I went down there and probably the first show was the Cold Crush Brothers. That's what I talked about in the Scratch movie. It was just fabulous, man. I had the greatest time. After that, I went back there a couple of times, and when the party moved to The Roxy, I was there probably three Fridays out of four, because it was a Friday-night party.
AVC: What was the audience like in shows like that? Was it integrated? Was it an African-American crowd?
S: No, no, I would say probably more than 50 percent were African-American, but past that, very integrated and extremely… How would I put it? Everybody was friendly, because at that point, hip-hop was completely so, so tiny that anybody who was in it was welcome. It was that sort of a thing. It was just like "Yup, you're here—you belong here." There was no question. It didn't start to get segmented until a while later. Years later, actually.
AVC: At that point, there was a lot of crossover. Grandmaster Flash was opening for The Clash, though it apparently didn't go over well.
S: They got bottles thrown at them.
AVC: It seems so backward that people who love The Clash would be so hostile to black music.
S: Well, I don't think they saw it that way. They saw it as some sort of ghetto crap. Like, "What are these guys? I came here to see The Clash and see guitar-based stuff, not a bunch of these chanting guys with records." Shit got thrown at them, man. That's pretty normal. You're always gonna find some people who think that this thing is not as good as the last thing. I'm sure that there's a lot of rock people going "Well, fuck, man, what is it, just talking over records? Well, fuck that!" You know, some guitar guy who's really disappointed that this other type of music seems to have taken over the world. Before that, there's probably some jazz musician, figuratively, with a goatee and a beret, sitting around with a saxophone going "What the fuck? A bunch of guys with guitars that can't fucking play!" You know, there's always going to be that. When something else comes in and takes over hip-hop, a bunch of people are going to be sitting around going "Holy shit, at least I could rap over records. These motherfuckers…" You know, whatever.
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