Richard Lewis and Michael Robinson of Dig Deeper

LOCAL SPOTLIGHT NYC
You wouldn’t be wrong if you called Richard Lewis and Michael Robinson show promoters, record collectors and DJs, but oftentimes these guys sound more like detectives. For the past two years, Richard and Michael (DJ Honky and Mr. Robinson when they’re behind the turntables) have been tracking down their favorite soul artists and bringing them to Brooklyn to perform at a monthly night called Dig Deeper. It’s harder than it sounds. Often you’ll find that the people behind some of the best mid-sixties soul records, from the heavy hitters like Don Gardner and The Mighty Hannibal to total unknowns like Eula Cooper, have become nearly untraceable. But Richard and Michael scour the earth, from illegal blues clubs in Sweden to the projects of East New York, to bring these musicans to the fans they might not even know they have, and to introduce them to a new set of converts. Check back soon for our interview with October’s Dig Deeper artist, The Green Berets, and if you want to see what Dig Deeper is all about, head over to Southpaw on January 23 to catch Darrow Fletcher.

JM.com: When or how did you become a big fan of soul music?

Michael: Well I go back a little further than Richard. Back when I was a teenager I was already DJing in London, back in the early eighties. The music at the time was horrible in England. It was called jazz-funk. Unfortunately it’s still kind of popular now. It filled me with horror, it really did. Around that time there was a thing in London called acid jazz, and although there were contemporary bands recording stuff like that, I was buying a lot of Prestige late sixties 7000 series, and then mixing in what I didn’t really know was James Brown’s backing band. The J.B.’s had a great LP, Doing it to Death, with like a ten and a half minute track called “La Di Da La Di Day,” which I would still play now cause it was time to get two drinks and have a chat with a pretty girl in the front of the bar. People used to sell soul packs: twenty records for two pounds. This was when I was living on ten or twelve pounds a week as a student, I’d buy the extra-thin turkey slices, sixteen in a pack, they were like, wafer-thin – you could see light through them! And I had two a day – I mean it was ridiculous – because you know, I had to buy music. It kind of took on a life of its own to the extent that by the time I was 24, I moved to America, because this was where the music came from. I got off the plane here not knowing anyone in the city. And then my very first weekend one of my all time favorite singers was playing. I got to pretend to be a journalist from a blues and soul magazine, got backstage, got to have him dedicate a song to me. So the first person outside of work who knew my name in New York was a singer called Chuck Jackson.

Richard: My history with soul music is a lot shorter. Also I’m much younger than Michael too, so that’s part of it. I guess it really just came from wanting to find music that other people weren’t listening to. And that sort of had different eras in my music listening history. So when I was in high school I spent a lot of time digging through record shops in Houston trying to find old seventies prog rock LPs, all of which, on looking back, were horrible, but it was stuff that, rightfully so, no one else was listening to. Then when I was in college, indie rock was a huge thing for me. It sort of blew my mind that there were all these bands on labels I’d never heard of. And it was all handmade and small and fascinating. And then after college I moved to LA for work. I had heard soul music and loved it but never really realized that there was this deep well of records and artists that were not Al Green or the big names that everyone’s heard of. There were a couple DJs in LA that did a weekly night that I started going to, and every week it was stuff I’d never heard of before. I started looking around and I realized that there was massive quantities of fantastic, legitimately good – not like prog rock horrible, but legitimately great – music that no one had ever heard of, and when you play these records for people it just sort of blows their minds. And so I moved to New York and within six days of moving here I met Michael at a soul night. Michael was DJing and I was listening to everything he was playing – and didn’t know anything, of course – and I thought I’d be cheeky and go request some obscure record.

Michael: He wanted to make an impression. New boy in town, bless him.

Richard: Right, ask for something weird that the DJ wouldn’t know. And so I asked for The Isonics on Kammy, and Michael’s like, “Oh, you mean this one?” And after that we became fast friends.

JM.com: So when was the very first Dig Deeper show?

Michael: June the 28th.

Richard: Of 2008.

JM.com: And how did you guys start Dig Deeper?

Michael: Both of us had DJed so many events over the years that to come up with something better was not just a bigger club or louder sound system. So as well as thinking that could have live music, we were like, “Well we don’t want to have contemporary, lets do this properly. Let’s start tracking down older artists.” That’s harder than it sounds. Number one, you’ve got to find them. We’ve been working on some people for years. They’ve disappeared, it’s insane.

Richard: And it’s not like they have MySpace and Facebook pages. They don’t have booking agents or anything.

Michael: And often you don’t even know their real name. There’s no photo. If you’re lucky enough, you find them. Then the question is would they agree to sing? Would they be able to sing? I’ve seen a ton of artists where it’s great seeing them but their voice is gone. They never ever ever ever own their records, or even recordings of their records. So any artist we get even in touch with, we properly start buying up everything they did from the two dollar to the two thousand, so that when we agree to have someone for one of our shows we’ve got a CD ready for the band and the bandleader. They learn the songs and write them out, knowing full well that the artist’s voice will have changed over the years. Always, male or female, they’ll have come down a pitch or two in the register. And they have to be able to adapt very quickly because, as is always the case when they’re from out of town, we’re gonna fly them in the day before the show, they’re gonna have a sit-down with the band leader, and he’s gonna go through all the songs one by one and figure out what needs to be changed, write out every single part for every single instrument for every single song that night, and then sit down with the band the afternoon of the show and talk through the changes. So on the day of the show we have a walk-through with the singer, which is actually the best thing because often it’s the first time the song has been sung live in thirty or forty years. So its goose pimples and teary eyes often for the pair of us as these songs come out cause this is really what we do it for.

Richard: It sort of dawned on us after we’d been talking about doing a night together for a year or so that we can keep talking about this for a long time, but these artists, a lot of them are in their sixties and getting into their seventies and if we keep waiting we’re not going to be able to ever put this night on. This is it. This is the last shot that anybody has to hear these artists. There are folks that we really were planning to bringing in that have now passed away, Eddie Bo, Little Ann. It takes a truly insane amount of work to pull this off.

Michael: Every show you have to build up from nothing, you know, you negotiate the songs – that’s always fun. Richard tends to do that cause he’s a lot calmer than I am.

Richard: I’m the chief diplomacy officer for Dig Deeper.

Michael: Yeah, he’s the nice guy. Often the artist has discovered God and/or rap and made an album in the eighties on CD.

Richard: Incorporating both.

Michael: And they really really want to play that because then they can sell their CD at the show.

Richard: I have to have the conversation about, “I know you really want to do the crack ballad. You can’t do the crack ballad.”

JM.com: How do you go about choosing the artists? Just the people you like the most, or do you particularly look for people who have not been performing in a long time?

Richard: The starting point is: whose records do we love? And that’s actually a very long wish list of folks that we’re desperate to find and we keep trying every angle to try to find them. Each story is a little bit different. The guy that we’ve been desperate to find who we think lives somewhere in New York is a guy named Tommy Dent. He recorded two 45s as best we know. There are three known copies to exist of one of them, and two known copies to exist of the other. We’ve been searching high and low. I dragged my then fiancée to the projects of East New York to try to knock on what we thought was his door. We left him a pre-stamped envelope, you know, “If you’re Tommy Dent, we’re huge fans of yours and could you please write us back?”

Michael: Trying databases, trying to find phone records.

Richard: One of our friends works in the legal profession and has been looking everywhere he can find. Every once in a while you get lucky.

Michael: The singer we have coming up in a couple of weeks was the first person we had on the list and it’s taken us maybe two years. One person in Europe had his number and lost his cell phone. He was the only person who had it.

JM.com: Do you use the same backing band each time?

Richard: We’re actually really lucky to be in touch with three different bands, all of whom are incredibly talented, super into soul music, and can actually handle that a month before the show they get a CD and the band leader goes through and writes out all the charts and figures out all the keys and talking to the artists, you know, can they still hit the high notes? Do we need to pitch it down a couple keys? Without those three bands, this never ever would work. The Sweet Divines is a local band that performs a lot of their own music when they’re not backing artists at Dig Deeper, fantastic group, super talented. The Solid Set actually was the first band to back at one of our shows, and in fact, that’s how the first show happened because Damon, who’s the band leader for The Solid Set, actually found Don Gardner.

JM.com: Are you guys musicians yourself?

Michael: When I was five or six years old my parents sent me off to music lessons with an envelope of cash for the first lessons of the semester. He gave me an hour lesson and I was sent home with the envelope and inside it was all the money and a message to my parents saying “don’t waste it.” So no, apparently I’m not. I can’t even sing in the shower.

Richard: I played the piano for twelve years and the reason it took me that long was that I was not very good. So I appreciate music and I love playing it out, but the turntable is the only instrument I play at this point.

Jm.com: Can you tell me about the different clubs where you’ve hosted Dig Deeper, and tell me a little bit about the format of the night?

Richard: We started off with Don Gardner at the Five Spot. We love the Five Spot, but over time it got to be difficult putting on live music there because they don’t have a regular sound guy, so unfortunately whatever hip hop night goes on there when we’re not there, they blow out the speakers and everything is torn up and it’s just a mess. We ended up finding Southpaw because the guys there were huge fans of soul music, had been out to our shows and were looking to add something like Dig Deeper to their roster of events. We start off the night just playing records. Since we moved to Southpaw we generally have an opening act. It’s usually been the Sweet Divines doing their own opening set, and then DJ a bit more in between and then the main act comes on at midnight. And then we DJ a dance party until 4:00 AM or until everyone falls asleep.

Michael: One of the things you’d never get Richard to boast about is that between us we’ve probably got two of the better record collections of this type in the world. Not just America. One of our joke names when we were trying to come up with a name for the night – which is harder than it sounds, not trying to sound all cliché, “Austin Powers a Go Go,” whatever – one of my favorites was “Third Known Copy.” Because for some reason, really really rare and great records seem to exist in groups of three, of which, in an amazing number of times, we own one or two of three copies, and someone else around here owns the third.

Richard: We spend lots of our time trying to find stuff that nobody’s heard. And not only are you hearing an artist at Dig Deeper that you never get to hear otherwise, but then you’re hearing records that you would never have a chance to hear anywhere else.

Michael: And the beer’s quite cold, too.

JM.com: I know it’s hard to find good records around here and so much stuff is online, but is there anywhere in New York where you like to go to find records?

Michael: There’s nowhere in New York. But I’d say about two weekends a month I’m driving somewhere very early. I like traveling and getting my hands dirty and going to funny parts of the world. And just good old fashioned record fairs.

Richard: I wish I had more time for it. My job keeps me on the road 30 – 40% of the time, so you know, when I get home on the weekends I just want to be at home. So I do buy a lot on eBay.

JM.com: How many records do you have in your collection? Ballpark?

Richard: Between us we have quite a few thousands of records.

Michael: Just a few. There’s a warehouse outside of Philly that has four million 45s sorted by label, and I’ve gone there once a month every month for about the past ten or eleven years going through every label that I’ve ever heard of, so even there, with four million records, I only come out with a couple. In a way it’s dispiriting, it’s like, I’ve just spent a whole day, literally covered in bits of paper and dust and cat hair, actually – warehouse cat – and everything I already have. It gets harder and harder and harder.

JM.com: People have been talking a lot about a resurgence of interest in soul music – I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that people can find stuff online now or download comps or mp3s. Have you guys found that to be true at the shows?

Michael: I notice it a lot more because I go over to Europe to DJ at weekenders. So so so many of the kids are in their early twenties, and for them it’s like a lifestyle, it’s not just a weekend thing. There’s less of that here, but there’s still a really good age range at every event, not just that we do but that we go to. Definitely. Which is great. The bad thing is that you’ve got the faux DJ thing, you know, not just the micro-celebrities who think they can put on a couple of CDs and pretend to mix or something. So the whole term DJ is one that I think got tarnished for a while. For a while it was like you didn’t want to use the word about yourself, because it got so overused for a lot of people who really had no knowledge. They just liked the attention. Whereas now there’s a bit more honest interest in the music. It’s great when you meet someone, in my case, less than half my age, who you can talk to about these things.

Richard: The thing that kind of amazes me is how the interest in soul music and even awareness of soul music is still so much smaller in the US – even though it has grown – than in Europe. You know, Michael goes over to Europe, I’m playing over in Sweden in January, and it’s typical for there to be over 1,000 people coming out to the night to hear us DJ. Here it’s totally different. It hasn’t reached that point. And this is where it’s from!

Michael: I must admit there is kind of an irony, being English, kind of selling music back to the Americans. It’s like, that’s not meant to happen!

JM.com: Well, what’s up next in 2010?

Michael: For anyone who wonders what great sixties soul music sounds like, come and hear Darrow Fletcher.

interview by Erin Sheehy
photo by Esko Routamaa

poster by Mark Weddington