Record Shopping with Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings
Issue #33
Soul’s got nothin’ to do with diva
By Megan Martin
Published: September 1st, 2007 | 12:00am
If authenticity were for sale, it might be disguised as cardboard and vinyl. Gone are the days of yesteryear when listening booths outnumbered iPods and the term “pirated” was exclusive to raping and pillaging. As new replaces old, there is still something to be said for the sounds and rhythms captured from times past. Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings can appreciate an old blues riff, a powerful gospel voice, and even a little pillaging (but only in the used record bins).
On a hot Saturday in June in Brooklyn, New York, Jones strolls to Academy Records to meet the Venus Zine crew and two of her bandmates. She is not what you’d expect from her online presence (as so few things are) — a diva in a red dress belting out bluesy, gut-wrenching, toe-curdling songs. In fact, there is nothing remotely diva-like about her. She’s dressed casually and is sporting a Bluetooth, a black baseball cap, and her hair up in high ponytails. From first meeting to her departure, she constantly has everyone in stitches.
“Ray Charles was blind, but he got a lot of women. Must have been good with his fingers,” she says sifting through soul records. “Aretha Franklin is only five dollars! She’s probably turning over somewhere goin’ ‘Five Bucks!’ They probably got me in here for 50 cents.”
The point of today is record shopping — with our budget of $50. It’s something Jones doesn’t do often. “I gotta get one of those things, an album burner.”
“You mean a record player?” quips her slightly-less-than-animated-on-a-Saturday-morning bandmate Gabrielle “Bosco Mann” Roth.
Roth and Neil Sugarman (bass and tenor, respectively), however, do this all the time. So much in fact that they have it down to a science.
“I start at the front of the store with new arrivals,” Roth says. “Then I come over here to soul, then over there to blues and gospel.”
Roth and Sugarman sift through all the obscure, lesser-known records — Hugh Masakela’s The Americanization of Ooga Booga, The Terrible Frankie Nieves, Ray Baretto’s Acid — while Jones goes for the popular soul classics: Aretha and Ike and Tina.
“I gotta get this one just for the dress she’s wearing,” says Jones about Ike and Tina Turner’s Ooh Poo Pah Ooo. On the record cover, Turner is rockin’ those legs as usual, in a hole-y knitted white tunic dress. Jones picks up a Velvet Underground record and puts it back. “I’m supposed to be in Europe right now singing with Lou Reed, and they were gonna pay me a lot of money, too.”
She declined, though, deciding instead to pursue a new field of entertainment: film. “They offered me a movie with Denzel [Washington] and Forrest Whitaker,” Jones says. “Forget about it!”
SHARON JONES' PICKS
• Ike and Tina Turner, Ooh Poo Pah Ooo
• Aretha Franklin, Amazing Grace
GABRIELLE "BOSCO MANN" ROTH'S PICKS
• The Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band,
The Jungle Babe
• Hugh Masekela, The Americanization of
Ooga Booga
• Bobby Bland, The Soul of the Man
• The Terrible Frankie Nieves, s/t
NEIL SUGARMAN'S PICKS
• Highway QC’s, All Men are Made By God
• The Impressions, This is My Country
• Junior Walker and the All Stars, Live!
• Ray Barreto, Acid
• Dinah Washington, Late Late Show
TOTAL: $98.62 (No worries: Though they went over-budget, they footed the rest of the bill.)
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