Amy Winehouse's 'Back to Black': Everything You Didn't Know

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Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of My Heart Radio. Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show that brings you the secret histories and little known facts behind your favorite music, movies, TV shows and more. We are your bee hived brethren of British soul diva details. Yes, you know we're no good, but you gotta love us anyway. My name is Jordan run Tug. I'm Alex Hegel. Holy buddy, you give me that one. Wow came out, You're coming out swing, coming in hot, you know what. I've got so much love and excitement for this one. We are paying tribute to my favorite album of the twenty one century. And don't just take my word for it. The Guardian proclaimed, it is such a few years back. I'm talking about Amy Winehouse's master work Back to Black. And you know, I've said many times on this show that I wasn't really connected to a lot of contemporary pop culture when I was younger, but this, this I led into my heart the moment I heard It's after it was released in two thousand six, and I hold it close to this day. It's an album steeped in heartbreak. After Amy's obsessive five story Fire of a relationship with Blake Fielder. Civil came to an end the first time around, and Amy burned bright for such a short time. She was only a truly global artist for about four years, from the summer of two thousand seven into her death in the summer of two thousand eleven. But her star burns bright. What do you think, Heigel, did she affect you in the same way that she affected me? And not deeply emotionally, But I do like her music. I mean, for me, it's a little bit more about the dap Kings. Yeah, but yeah, you know, Amy's great, man, what do you say about her? You know, like real She's a real kind talent. Yeah, she was a real one and a very troubled person. And you try not to let the ladder overshadow the fourth you know, but it can be tough. Sorry I was depressing. No, I We're gonna try. We're gonna try not to let that be the the tone of this episode. But I know you're absolutely right. Uh. She will forever be one of my all time favorites, and people far more eloquent than I have praised her as a once in a generation voice for multiple reasons. In terms of her lyrical point of view, which brought a hip hop swagger into vintage American soul and a dose of twenty one century cynicism into songs that really could have otherwise almost been jazz standards. And then, of course, the thing that's so obvious that we haven't even bothered to mention it yet, her singing, which borders on the supernatural as far as I'm concerned. Um. I once had the great privilege of spending an afternoon with another late great Ronnie Specter of the Fabulous Ronetts and Uh. She was a fellow member of the bee Hive sisterhood, ladies with big hair, big voices, and big spirits who were mistreated by small men in their lives. And the topic of Amy Winehouse came up, and Ronnie said that Amy's talent was a pretty strong argument that singing came from the soul, and really Amy had a very old soul. Otherwise there was really no explaining how that sound came out of that body. And I couldn't help but smile then and now to think how Amy would have enjoyed hearing that from one of her idols. She loved Ronnie Specter, Uh, and I have to say, I'm inclined to agree with Ronnie. After Amy's death, she was praised by so many, including Bob Dylan, who described her in seventeen as quote the last real individualist around which I like Adele thanked her for paving the way for her and other neo soul divas, and Lady Gaga echoed the sentiment of fans all over the world when she tweeted, I remember feeling not alone because of Amy. She lived jazz and she lived the blues, and I think that's the real reason why Amy's legacy would continue to endure. It's more than just her talent. How did you thank someone who got you through so many broken hearts? And that's what she did for me, and I know I'm not alone. The BBC wrote an article a few years back suggesting that Back to Black was the millennials version of I Will Survive, which I'm not sure if I totally agree with the comparison, but I see what they were going for. Amy's producer and friend, Mark Ronson probably summed it up best. The pain that she expressed helps so many people get through their pain. She showed us the darkest part of herself and somehow did it in a way that made people smile. I think that's a neat trick. She was so brutally honest and so wickedly funny, especially when it came to her own self assessments. The most enduring description of her, in my mind, came from a Newsweek profile in two thousand seven, which described her as quote a perfect storm of sex kitten, raw talent, and poor impulse control. Yeah, curate reading that is like a twenty year old I remember thinking, yeah, dream girl. She was flawed, but there was a strength there. And you know, I think of the title of her posthumous record, Lioness. That always seemed like the word to describe it. And you know, in a strange way, I think that Amy Winehouse gave hope to the rest of us imperfect people to try to be better, to try to find our own special thing, whatever it may be, that gives us grace even when we're feeling like a mess in every other area of our life. She wore her heart on her sleeve, and you couldn't help but love her. And it's tempting to think of her as a friend because she seemed to trust the audience as one and when she died, I mourned her as a friend. The silly as that sounds, it's probably the only celebrity death that I actually shed a tear over, and not just selfishly for all the music that we never got to hear from her, but because she was someone who seems so vulnerable and sensitive, and you've got the sense that she seemed to know the value of feeling loved and feeling peace, and you hoped against hope that she'd find it. And uh, and I think that her death was a shocking wake up call. I mean, this was the Arrow and Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton and Britney Spears were all struggling publicly, and they were basically just punchlines for late night comedians and tabloids, and everyone just sort of conveniently ignored the fact that these were life or death situations, which is what made Amy's death so much more perversely tragic. It just seems so obvious, you know, I mean, there was nothing about it that was a surprise whatsoever. But somehow you didn't actually think it would end that way. I know I didn't, And the cognitive dissonance with that was just so strange. And I think that her death went a long way and ensuring that people struggling in the public eye aren't covered that way by the media. Ever. Again, we really, I mean not we, you and I. We were not part of that infrastructure. But what my first couple of years was, Yeah, I mean I didn't write mean things, but I remember that was part of the environment. Yeah, I mean just that whole era. We we really failed a generation of women who obviously and clearly needed help, and we're turned into ongoing punchlines. There's a book called train Wreck The Women We Love to Hate, Mock and Fear and Why by Sadie Doyle, which is really sting and basically is uh a cultural history of how female celebrities are covered in the media. These like the women I mentioned, the Paris Hilton's, the Lindsay Mohan's, the Britney Spears and and Amy Winehouse. And then she also does this really interesting thing, these interstitial chapters where she goes back in time and writes about famous women in history as if they were being covered by a you know, era blogger. Uh. And it's it's a really interesting book. I encourage folks to check it out. It's really interesting. But I mean taking it more personal. My one way bond with Amy was forged in January two thousand nine. Uh, in order to get over a failed relationship situation, I'd enrolled in a six month study abroad program in London in hopes study change of scenery would help me get over my broken heart. But here's a tip. If you're trying to get over a heartbreak, don't go to a place where you know no one in frigid January where there was about five hours of sunlight a day, So yeah, that wasn't great. And I just used to wander London daily, uh, just for hours on end with my iPod playing Back to Black as my soundtrack. And our door was in North London, and I knew that Amy lived a short walk away in Camden, and I had read one of those up All Night with Amy Winehouse rolling Stone Profiles or something where, uh I learned that she had a habit of going outside and welcoming any stray fans in and cooking them burnt toast and tea, and uh, yeah, I just thought that was sweet and sad. I guess she just didn't want to be alone. So I wonder up there during my semester in London and try to find her house and I hope she'd bring me inside. To this day, I couldn't tell you why. I think I just was so bummed out, and her music made it clear that she'd been through something similar, and you know, I guess I thought maybe she could big sister me through it. UM. I also got the sense that maybe she needed friend too. I'm still bummed. I never got to see her then in London, law in concert. Aside from festivals, she really didn't do normal concerts or tours very much after two thousand seven, and even those were spotty just because of her health. One of my treasured possessions is a concert ticket from a show in the fall of two thousand seven that she never got to give UM canceled for some combination of personal and logistical problems. I would have loved to have cashed that ticket in and gone anyway. Enough of my pathetic love note Dammy Winehouse. Let's get into the agony and ecstasy of this wonderful record from the relationship drama and emotional turmoil that inspired it to the renegade band of Brooklyn soul musicians who gave it the groove, the argument that led to her cover of the zoo Toones song Valerie That's on Whips, and how Mark Ronson got any Winehouse to overcome her and the holy hatred of strings. Here's everything you didn't know about Back to Black by Amy Winehouse in two thousand five. Emmy Winehouse was at a cross roads every time. She had released her debut album Frank two years earlier, an album that you could call R and B influenced jazz tunes or jazz influenced R and B tunes. I guess there's a little bit of both on there. Have you heard that record? Yeah? It's good. Yeah, I mean Annie was, I mean, no other way to put it. A jazz vocal prodigy. She was singing Sarah Vaughan and Dinah Washington songs in the National Youth Jazz Orchestra as a teenager. And in the Amazing Any documentary by A. Sif Kapaedia, it opens with this amazing home movie of Amy and her tween friends goofing around on her friends fourteenth birthday, and it looks like any other home movie until Amy launches into an impromptu version of Happy Birthday, and it sounds like full grown Amy Winehouse, it's crazy again. It gets back to what Ronnie Specter said, this old soul just coming out of this thirteen fourteen year old girl. It's insane. And her two thousand three album, Frank, It was a modest hit in the UK and established her as one of the country's most distinctive vocalists and won her quite a few prestigious awards, the Ivor Novello Award, Mercury Music Prize, and was nominated for a brit Award, which is basically the UK Grammys. But Amy, who just turned twenty when it came out, was deeply unhappy with it. She was signed to Simon Fuller's management, and he'd previously overseen The Spice Girls and created the show that American Idol was based on, so he kind of had a whole business of creating cookie cutter pop stars basically, and although he was smart enough not to try to shove into that mold, there was a certain degree of interference in her sound. He hired some songwriters who polished off her really highly personal songs, and Amy was not happy with this, and she was not quite about it. In her interviews speaking about her album Frank, she told The Guardian, I don't have it in my house, before begrudgingly admitting that it isn't. This is gonna be I'm gonna break my my my long held no swearing on this show edict for Amy Winehouse, because otherwise we're not going to be able to get through her interview quotes songs. Uh. And in two thousand of our interview with The Observer titled I Love This Charmed and Dangerous, Amy said, something's on this album make me go to a little place that's fing bitter. I've never heard the album from start to finish. That marketing was, the promotion was terrible. Everything was a shambles. It's frustrating because you work with so many idiots, but the nice idiots, so you can't be like you're an idiot and they know they're idiots. Quote machine Amy Winehouse. Uh, there's a priceless interview that you can hear in that Amy documentary I mentioned where this chipper Dutch radio interviewer just toss ues her a softball about you know, hey, how's your new album? What do you think? And Amy just seethes about how pissed she is about the string sounds on the album, especially on the song take the Box, she quote, hey did the guy who did it? And went on and on and on about how she'd never let anyone do that to her songs. Again. We'll talk more about that later. So Frank was a bit flawed in her own eyes, but it did well enough to mean that the public and her label eagerly anticipated her follow up. Hilariously, I think she still might have been working as a journalist actually at this time, at the World Entertainment News Network. We used to get photos from them when I was at VH one back in ten. Yeah, it's funny, for all the years that she was hounded Byzzizzi, that she used to work in the entertainment journalism field. Uh yeah, I know. It's so weird. You can kind of hear it in her lyrics though. I mean, she has such a great economy of language that you could almost see being born from her days as a journalist. He was initially considering doing that as a full time career, but by January two five, now that Frank was falling down the charts, she'd quit her day job and was tasked with writing her next album. But it just wasn't happening. Uh, this writer's block was really bad, and by her own admission, she was just hanging out the hub all day, the Holy Arms, which was near her house in the North London neighborhood of Camden, and she just played pool, drank too much and listened to sixties girl groups in motown on the jukebox. And these were the sounds that she loved as a girl, and rediscovering them on the pub juke box pretty much gave her a new direction for her new album. And long before the album Back to Black was released, she was telling the press, I'm not a jazz girl anymore. She's talking to the UK outlet The Sun. She said, these new songs are more accessible than the tracks on frank as jazz is quite elitist. People don't get it. I've been listening to sixties bands and girl groups. There's a lot of bands which are sixties influence at the moment, but I guess I'm the only girl doing it. And then later on she would be followed by the likes of Adele and Duffy, remember Duffy and Joss stone Fill him a Faith and Little Boots. Stuffy was great. Rock Ferry was a great album. Um and of course that's when you start seeing the Ronnie Specter influence coming in for Amy, the beehive hair, the Cleopatra makeup, the mini skirts, and Andy would later say that the bee hive was a pysical manifestation of her insecurities, and whenever she was nervous, she would tell her hairstylist, make a taller, make a taller. I love her so much. So now you have the sound and the style of Back to Black coming to the floor. But she needed the emotional catalyst, and this took the form of one Blake Fielder, civil her boyfriend and frequent drinking buddy during these pub nights out in Camden Town. Black kind of minor role in the music industry is an assistant on music videos and he's generally seen as something of a ne'er do well, a reputation bolstered by the fact that he did prison time for perversion of justice. I was a uniquely UK terminology by misadventure are the two very very uniquely UK terms that unfortunately appear in this episode. I believe he beat up a pub landlord and then tried to pay him to withdraw allegations and leave the country. So yeah, assault and trying to bus we brive a victim. So yeah, anyway, just a real charmer. Yeah yeah. Blake is the man whose name is literally tattooed on Amy's heart, or at least over it. Uh. He's traditionally portrayed as the villain in the Amy Winehouse story, or at least an extremely bad influence. Look. I don't know much about addiction treatment, a relationship, code, dependency, or psychology in general to be able to speak on this in any meaningful or intelligent way, but blaming Amy's troubles squarely on Blake feels like a reductive take in a disservice to both of them. It's like using Mike Love as the scapegoat and the beach Boys from the I'm Happy Went Through. Yeah, I mean, I worshiped Brian Wilson, but Mike is a less sympathetic character but takes to flowed people, et cetera. The depth of Amy and Blake's codependency was such that, as Amy herself later said, I want to feel what he feels, And when you have two troubled people with addictive personalities, you're basically just magnifying each other's problems. She wanted to feel what he felt, which included crack, cocaine, heroin, and even self harm. They were in the midst of a fight one night when Blake grabbed the bottle and broke it and started cutting his arm, and then Amy grabbed the bottle from him and cut her own arm while looking at him dead in the eye and told him I'll do anything you do, which is chilling. I was a guest on the I Heart podcast Personology a few years back, which was hosted by Dr Gayl Salts, a psychologist, and each episode she would psychoanalyze a historical figure, and we did one on Amy Winehouse together, and her insights were deeply fascinating. If you want to go check that out. There's a great passage from the two thousand seven Rolling Stone profile on Amy that is I think really illustrative of their obsessive love. Wine House has insisted from the beginning of her career that she's a simple girl, crazy in love with her man. Her life, her history, and talent all seemed barely worth talking about when one could talk about Blake, how Fitty is, how perfect for each other they are, We're so in love, We're a team. She Wraps of the Eyes is to me, Blake, Blake, Blake, Blake, Blake, Blake, Blake. It's as if she's putting herself in a trance. A woman named Nicole chimes in, I'm gonna fall in love like Amy. I think I've been in love before. Amy lifts her head. No, No, if you had, you'd be dead because you weren't together right now. So that's what we're dealing with. Um I heard that one before. Good Lord, Yeah, I mean again, this is why this album I diet. I don't think that you need to know the backstory to be able to judge the emotional content of a song. I don't, and we talked about that in the Revolver episode. That's the song for No. One on Revolver, which is about the dissolution of a relationship, literally outlines that in the lyrics, and it's devastating. You don't need to know anything about the person who wrote that song in order for that to hit you. In this case with Amy, the lyrics hit you directly. But then when you go a little bit under the surface and you actually learn a little bit about her and her relationships, it just takes on a whole new level. And maybe this is why this is an album that I almost feel protective of. She seems so without skin, just just so raw, just such a raw nerve that went through life that Um what was that Nick Drake documentary solid Are No A Skin Too Few? Which is a documentary on the on the late folk singer songwriter British folks singer songwriter Nick Drake Skin Too Few. It reminds me of of Amy just just I think maybe that's why I and fans I feel such a kinship towards her. It's almost like you want to protect this person in some strange way because the emotions are just so all consuming for her. And uh and you know, as a teenager, late teenager for me, when I discovered her music, that hit home because that's what being a teenagers like. But she never really granted that, I guess, or didn't have a chance to. So this is what we're dealing with. Blake had been dating someone when they met, and at some point in mid two thousand five, he told Amy that he was going back to her, just like the lyrics said, and back to black. Then it got nessie. Amy took revenge by sleeping with his friend and She later explained, I knew it would be the nail in the coffin. I knew that when he found out, he wouldn't be able to talk to me. Ever Again, I knew I had to do it because one of us had to finish the other one off, because we just broke each other's hearts repeatedly. When the relationship finished, I went nuts. I was the most reckless ever. I just went mad. I'd look in the fridge and think of him. I'd walk up the stairs and see blood and see him because he used to punch the walls Jesus Christ. As we'll get to later. They would ultimately reunite and get married after the album inspired by their breakup had become a hit all around the world. Coincidence, m well, This emotional trauma had the upside of breaking through Amy's writer's block, and she began writing the bulk of what would be um Back to Black in late two five. She later said, when I sit down and I have a lot of feelings that I can't deal with, that's when I write songs. I've always written songs at points in my life when I don't know what to do except write a song. So I guess that's why they come out kind of traumatized. So she was processing her grief, guilt and heartbreak, and songs that I guess as she was writing them felt romantic, but in retrospect are all kinds of heavy, capturing the full spectrum of that codependent relationship. As Electraspetritis writes in his guardian piece calling Back to Black, the Greatest album of the twenty one century, these songs are shot through with references to hedonism that always feel nihilistic, never celebratory. There are umpteen mentions of booze and drugs, but none to partying. Are having a good time only their ability to obliterate. Amy told Rolling Stone in two thousands seven, after they've reunited, around the time they got married, all the songs are about the state of my relationship at the time with Blake. I had never felt the way I feel about him about anyone in my life. It was very cathartic because I felt terrible about the way we treated each other. I thought we'd never see each other again. He laughs about it now, He's like, what do you mean you thought you'd never see each other again. We love each other. We've always loved each other. But I don't think it's funny. I wanted to die. Mark Ronson, who produced half the songs I'm Back to Black, would later say that when it came time to record the songs, it seemed very clear that they were writing about an era in Amy's life that she'd move past. But I don't think so. Yeah. I mean, having that, you know, go through all these songs and not only to write them, but then also sing them and then sing them on stage, you have to wonder if it's talk about them in the press. Yeah, I've just had the unintended side effect that just re traumatizing her. Yeah. I mean there's that whole thing about how child stars are stuck at the age with that they become famous at sure. I mean it's not a stretch to extend that to the idea that you are stuck in the emotional state that you create art in while you're having to recreate that art constantly, which is a grim thing for any performing artist to have to confront. Yeah, that's a that's a beautifulay to put it. I mean, she would later say, you know, when you write songs, you have to remember everything. You have to remember what the wind felt like you have to remember what his next smelt like. And we mentioned that earlier album Frank had used a lot of co writers on her songs, whether she wanted to or not. Uh. Seven out of the eleven tracks on Back to Black were written solely by Amy without any co writer. Uh. So clearly these are much more personal. The writer Laura Barton wrote in a piece in The Guardian after Amy's death called Amy Winehouse saying of a deeply feminine suffering. The piece examined Amy's lyrics, which Barton compares to raw honestly of early blues women like Ethel Waters, mol Rainey, Big Mama Thornton. She wrote pop music had often cast women as sweet, bright creatures, but Winehous's lyrics revealed something mulchier, messier. Here was a woman who refused to conform, not in the eccentric madwoman in the attic mold of Kate Bush or Puork Yeah, but a woman who chose to live a little wild, follow her heart and seeing of the simple stew of being female. Her songs were filled with broad talk, cussing drink and drugs and dicks. Song that could hinge on one magnificent, unladylike question. What kind of free is this? She's saying openly, a female desire, not the squawky, shrill sexuality of sex in the city, but something truer, more physical, more serious. She's saying about the ache of the body, the need for emotion, the distracting a lure of a man's shoulders, shirt underwear when he comes to me, I dripped for him tonight, She's sang on wake Up Alone, drowned in me, we bathe under blue Light. That was actually the first song recorded during the sessions for Back to Black, done with producer Paul O'Duffy, who is best known for producing Swing Out Sister. What the hell is that? Jordan's swing out Sis? So it's like a new Jack swing group from No I don't That's all I know. I Uh, he's kind of written out of Amy's story. Producers Solemn Remy and Mark Ronson get most of the attention, but Amy spent a month in O'Duffy's North London studio working on songs, and this is the only one that wound up on the album wake Up Alone. The original idea was inspired by nine seventy two song by Sarah Vaughan called Deep in the Night, and O'Duffy, who co wrote the song with her, later told Mojo she had a book and would be drawing pictures of herself with love, hearts and things, and you knew she was off in another world. Then she started writing lyrics and at a certain point she said, Oh, I've got something. In the normal process, a singer might share a lyric or melodic idea, but she sang it in one take. I was like, Wow, where does this come from? Mark Ronson gave this song a bit of a retro girl group style revamp, but the original version and with Paulo Duffy playing jazzy acoustic guitar, is included on the aforementioned posthumous Rarities comp Lioness Yeah, wake Up Alone is one of my favorite songs on this album. It's just such a great song of longing, and unlike most Torch songs out there, which are usually variations of why did you leave me? Why did you do this to me? You know, think, adele Amy songs were occasionally pretty self lacerating. One of my favorite songs of her as ever, as a song on Frank called I've heard Love is Blind? Have you heard this song. It's basically Amy talking to her boyfriend, and she's justifying why she slept with some other guy. And I've tried to pick a representative line from the lyrics, but after reading it over, it just felt like a sin to break it up because it reads like a short story. It's kind of a deep cut, just as much as that's possible for somebody who has so few songs. But I'd like to share the lines from the song with you. I've heard love is blind. I couldn't resist him. His eyes were like yours. His hair was exactly the shade of brown. He's just not as tall, but I couldn't tell. It was dark and I was lying down. You are everything. He means nothing to me. I can't even remember his name. Why are you so upset? Baby? You weren't there, and I was thinking of you when I came. What did you expect? You left me here alone? I drank so much and needed to touch. Don't have a react. I pretended he was you. You wouldn't want me to be lonely? How can I put it so? You understand? I didn't let him hold my hand, but he looked like you. I guess he looked like you though he wasn't you. But you can still trust me. This ain't infidelity, it's not cheating. You were on my mind. Yes he looked like you, but I heard love was blind. I just think that's an incredible bit of lyric writing for so many different reasons. Uh, you almost believe her, You almost like you're almost like, okay, I said, get it, which is a neat trick. But you also it's it's so unflattering to put that out there, but to do it so brazenly and so beautifully and so wittily to me, I know it's it's kind of a deep cut on the non hit album, but that, to me is one of her finer moments. It's a beautiful vocal performance too. Um and I share this because she brings the same sensibility to the Back to Black sessions, Uh, specifically on you Know I'm No Good, in which she admits in pretty graphic detail that she cheated on Blake, and when Mojo Magazine's Tom Doyle asked Amy if the lyric was true, she admitted, yeah, Blake hates it. He's really proud of me. But it's so personal. It must be hard when I'm like pen to paper. I'm the most honest. I get just a side note, because if there's a bond detour, I'm gonna take it. The song makes reference to Roger Moore. You know, by the time I'm out the door, you teared men down, like Roger Moore. Roger Moore was actually asked about this, and he said that he had no idea why Amy chose to include him in the lyrics. The best that he could come up with was that she either wanted a word that rhymed with door or she couldn't find a word that rhymed with Connery. He's Cockney Cockney rhyming slang is much easier when it's monosyllabic. He's not my favorite bond, but he kind of seems like probably the bond that maybe he is the nicest person. Have you read that airport story? I don't think so. Oh man, I might cut this, but it's so it's so good, So I guess like at some point in the eighties, this little kid was at an airport and Roger Moore was sitting there and he was freaking out. He was so excited, So he got his dad to go over and get his autograph, and his dad came back and brought the autograph over and handed as the kid, dad, what's this that's James Bond. Why does it say who's Roger Moore? Why do you write you right? The name Roger Moore? What the hell is this? So the dad takes whatever he signed, goes back over to Roger Moore rogers like um, like he nods, he gets it. He waves a little kid over and goes, hey, you know, I know I wrote Roger Moore. That's the name I have to sign because it's my code name. Blowfeld could be anywhere around here, like you're working with me now, Like you get it, Roger Moore? Okay. So and he was the cutest thing. Twenty years go by and this kid grows up. He's like a video producer or something, and he crosses paths with Roger Moore again, and he casually brings up that he'd run into him into this airport, you know, twenty years earlier, and Roger, you know, it's graceful, bad, but you know, he doesn't. Of course he doesn't remember. Why would anyone expect them to. Later, after the shoots wrapped at the end of the day, they passed each other in the hallway, and Roger Moore waves him over and goes, of course I remember our rendezvous at the airport, but I couldn't sell you there. There are too many witnesses, of course, like because I remember, Yeah, it's not great. I love that Sean Connery would have just punched him in a bad was it? Michael is in Michael Caine that tells a story about being in a bar with like Sean Connery and someone like talked about him and got up and like folded his jacket and like asked Michael Caine to hold it and then like beat the hell out of all four men like outside of the pub. Oh yeah, oh he could. Was in the ex Navy and like a former Mr Universe, Mr Scott and Mr. Something like, yeah, he was a bodybuilder, which is so funny because you look at those old shirtless pictures and you're like, that's what buff men used to be. If you look at the rock, Who's like, yeah, my human growth hormone. As you meditate on that, we'll be right back with more too much information. After these messages, at the end of two thou five, Winehouse went to Miami to meet up with producer Salam Remy, who had worked on her debut album, or at least the parts of it that she liked. Um he'd worked with famous R and B names like the Fugis and Jasmine Sullivan and Miguel, but man still remains somewhat under the radar. He's a great quote. Most people don't even know I exist, and I don't want them to know my name. If you got to write it on a check has been my motto for a long time. That's one for the ages. Ah. He was something of a father figure to Amy and a true confidant. She went to his private studio and over ten days recorded five songs that would wind up on Back to Black Tears, Drying their own, some on Holy War. Me and Mr Jones just friends and addicted. And these sessions were very intimate, with Amy playing guitar and singing, while Salam added instruments that he usually played himself. Her engineer Gary Noble later said, like most British people who come here, she loved the sun. She loved reggae, so Miami having that island vibe was something she was into. She often went into Salam's back garden and worked on her lyrics, and it was sitting in that back garden there in the blue shade. She's saying that she finished the lyrics to what became Tears Dry on their Own. As she explained to a crowd at Shepherd's Bush in two thousand seven, this song is about when you're in a relationship and you know it is going to end, and you know you're going to be upset, but you know that you have to do it. She gave a little bit more detail about it to the Sun in October two thousand six, saying Tears Drying their Own is a track about the breakup with Blake, my ex. Most of these songs are about him. I shouldn't have been in a relationship with him because he was already involved with someone else a bit too close to home. The song is about when we split up and me saying to myself, yes, you're sad, but you'll get over it, and I did. I still talked to Blake, and once we got over the initial pain, it was fine. I believe you can be mates with your ex. I'm still really close to him as a friend and nothing more. Though Alex, my boyfriend, now doesn't like me seeing him, which is understandable. I guess he was correct. She left him and been married Blake. Uh. And that song is interesting because the backing track to it is basically the Marvin Gay Tammy Terrell do it Ain't No Mountain High Enough, written by the legendary Motown songwriting team Ashford and Simpson. Basically it is they have a songwriting credit on that is a sample or they just took they just re recorded the entire backing track. Oh okay. The original version of Tears Dry in their own was done as a ballad, which you can hear on the aforementioned Lioness Rarities. Cuts very down tempo, and Salam was worried that all the tracks that they had done had a similar mid tempo groove and was looking to change that up a bit. And by coincidence, he happened to come across some online leaks of these isolating Motown backing tracks Ain't No Mountain High Enough, which I have exact that exact stem package that he's talking about. Uh. And as he told Mojo, I was sitting there listening to it, and I was telling Amy tears Dry, I could work over that, but she just could not hear it. I almost had to sing it to get her to figure it out, and she was so frustrated being one take Amy. That's the most swearing I recorded of her ever. He said it was the only time he'd ever seen her frustrated in the creative process. She just couldn't figure out how to shoehorn all those lyrics into the quicker versions. A lot of lyrics, But it's a brilliant idea because not only does it work from a melodic standpoint, but it's also thematically. She's singing a heartbroken song about being alone over the backing track for one of the most famous romantic duets of all time. As Salam said, the whole idea was making her singing very sad lyrics against an encouraging backing track. That juxtaposition and also making one of the faster songs in the album kind of gave it another spark um. That's probably the most famous example of Amy interpolating an old R and B soul track on Back to Black, but it's not the only one. There's also a bit of the backing track of a relatively obscure N six song, My Girl She's a Fox by a group called The Iceman, which funnily enough, features a pre fame Jimmy Hendrix. Also remember the twenty seven Club playing guitar along with Lonnie young Blood. Yeah, he's on sax. Do you heard that song at the sound? Great song? Oh yeah, that's Jimmy. That just sounds like the intro wind cries mar I know, yeah, that's great. But that song was it was. It wasn't sampled, it was. It was revamped as uh, the song he Can Only Hold Her. They really got the whole thing. They got the guitar intro, they got the backing vocals and everything. Yeah, there's a there's a there's a we'll talk about this in a bit, but there's a there's an uncomfortable whiff of ganking to this whole thing. Say what do you will about the dap tone guys, But at least they fluted black people. What this is the era of like Mayor Hawthorne, where instead of like you get people making fake sixties or soul songs or early seventies funk cuts that were specifically designed to be sold to producers to be chopped up and then sometimes like Mayor Hawthorne in particular, with stuff like just Ain't Gonna work out those songs would actually be released and get airplay. Is such an interesting way to go about it instead of just going create diving anyway, salam Remy produced the track some Unholy War, which not one of MY favorite songs on the album, both because it's downbeat and also it's kind of an uncomfortable listen. Uh. Perhaps more than any song on this album, it's the one that I think best encapsulates the codependent tendencies between Blake and Amy. It's an obsessive song. It's about someone that she would die for. If my man was fighting someone holy war, I would be beside him. And the title came from a news radio broadcast about the war in Afghanistan which used the term holy war, and Amy heard this and twisted it to kind of fit the themes of her relationship issues with Blake. I would imagine that she thought the whole song was very romantic. You know right or wrong, stand by your Man. It's basically an updated version of the Tammy Wynette song. It reminds me when I was a teenager. I really loved the book Low Leader by Vladimir Nabakov because to me, as a fifteen year old, it seemed like the first book I'd ever read that perfectly encapsulated the obsessive insanity of new love, which it's a very teenage phenomenon, you know, I said that earlier, at the time I was a teen. I obviously knew that the relationship in the book was wrong on every level, but there was something about it that almost seemed romantic to me in my emotional maturity, You and Nick cave and then the older I got, I realized just how disturbing that kind of obsession and code dependency actually is. And it's not romantic, it's just upsetting. That's kind of how I feel about this track Someone Holy War. It's also something a bit uh quintessentially British about using a war in the Middle East as a metaphorical dating life, like that's the first pass idea. This brings us to my favorite track to come from the salam Remy sessions at the end of two thousand five, Me and Mr Jones. The title is a play on Billy Paul's soul ballad Me and Mrs Johns, but the Mr Jones and Amy's version it's the robber nas born Nasir Jones. Amy was a huge fan of nas and even sampled his instrumental made you look on the Frank track in My bed and you know. For all that's been written about Amy's love of jazz, hip hop was a major influence for her. As a child. She started a short lived salt and pepper style rap group called Sweet and Sour with her childhood friend. Guess which one Amy was Sweeter Sour. The lyrics to me and Mr Jones are so great. It is, to my knowledge, the first long that mentions both eighties MC slick Rick and Sammy Javis Jr. So it's got that going for it, which is nice. It kicks off with one of the greatest opening lines of all time, again breaking my no no f bomb edict on this show. What kind of theory is this? What a all time opening lyric? Right there? Slam said that Amy had gotten that off of West Indians slang, which I guess is I'm not familiar with anyway. She really wanted to call the song Fury, but the label panicked. It's thinking that she would never get it on the radio with a title like that, because as I'm discovering right now, it's very hard to censor that word. Of course, this pissed Amy off to no end. Well you know, why can't I But they changed the title to Me and Mr Jones, which is kind of a better title. The song itself is about a guy she used to casually date who worked in the record industry and she used to get free tickets off him, but for whatever reason, jealousy or incompetence, he couldn't come through with seats for a Slick Rick concert, hence the you maybe missed the Slick gig. You thought I didn't love you when I did. Can't believe you played me out like that. It sounds like it was jealousy. He was holding out on her, but she refused to miss the gig for Nas, who she really admired and reportedly kind of had a crush on. Hence, nobody stands between Me and my man, Me and Mr Jones Nazier Jones, Nas And there are a lot of little hints in the song. She named checks Naz's daughter Destiny, and also his birthday September four, which coincidentally was also Amy's birthday, and Nas years later confirmed the song was about him, and in October interview with XXL, three months after Amy died, saying that they were actually planning a joint birthday celebration together. To be a fly on that wall. Yeah, NAS told Genius that he only met her once in person. I didn't get a chance to really know her that much. I knew her through music, I knew her through Skype, I knew her through texting, I knew her through telephone. I knew her through hanging out one time in London. The greatest thing, and the thing that's sad, is that I met someone who shared my same birthday and we had no competition, We had no beef, we had no tension, nothing like that. It was like we always knew we were supposed to be cool. And that's as far as it goes. She was like a sister to me, and the actually collaborated twice, I imagine, just you know, through email on the songs like Smoke and Cherry Wine, which were released after Amy's death. But now the question that I'm sure is on all of your minds did she make it to the NAS concert? The short answer is I don't know, but Google Slewice have determined that there was indeed a NAS gig at the Brixton Academy, which she sings about on March twenty one, two thousand five, a show that was notable because it was interrupted by a shooting that took place a half hour into it that injured one concert car. So let's hope that maybe she did miss the naz gig after all. One funny thing about the song Me and Mr Jones that you can hear a little bit of Amy's englishness coming through. She put on the tea kettle while they were taping the instrumental track, because the studio where Salam Remy was working, I think was in his home in Miami, and so you had the kettle on in the kitchen nearby, and it started going off midway through the recording. Salam said that they were recording and they just see Amy run off and they didn't know why. And he was listening to the track later and you heard this high frequency and he realized it was the tea kettle, and he left it on there, I guess because he can barely hear it. But if you listen to the end of the song, you can kind of hear this high frequency. It's like the phone ringing in the ocean by Zeppelin studio off about halfway through that, uh and is really cute. She used to love to use salam Remy's kitchen and enjoyed cooking big meals for all the musicians thereafter sessions and those who knew Amy said she knew how to make a mean chicken soup, like like a good Jewish mother. I know. But Back to Black had two producers, not just Salam Remy, but perhaps most famously Mark Ronson. They had very different styles, with Amy as the lynchpin. Salam described his contributions as being in the same town as Ronson's, but in a slightly seedier neighborhood, which is great. Um. Ronson came at his role as producer from an interesting position because he was a DJ, which you know, good background because you quickly discover an InSync for what works and what doesn't in respect to the dance floor. UH. He grew up in New York, attended n y U like Rick Rubin UH, and he was fascinated by the link between hip hop and the old soul records that they sampled. Even before he was globally famous for his work with Amy Winehouse. Ronsos Djaying album released parties for people like Jay z Uh. He was apparently the first DJ ever to pay big. He's hypnotize on a dance floor. Yeah. I verify this with him when I interviewed him for VH one a bunch of years ago, and I'm to this day really proud at how shocked he looked when I dropped that fact on him. He was so surprised. Yeah, he'd say. His DJ sets during this era were six hip hop, funk and disco reggae and ten percent rock and roll, which is a good blend. His early production work in the two thousand was very sample based um, and he came into the same orbit as Puffy Farrell Busta Rhymes UM, so not far from the hip hop background that salam Remy head. Ronson and Amy were first put in contact because they shared a publishing company, and she paid him a visit at his New York rehearsal studio in March of two thousand and six. Before she met him, she apparently thought he was going to be some old dude with a beard a la Rick Rubin uh, And she thought he was an engineer for the first few minutes because he was just barely thirty years old at the time. So they initially bonded on the superficial level at first, roughly the same age, Jewish and English, and initially he wanted to get just a sense of what she liked, and her response was specific and evocative. Talking to Mojo, he said, she said she liked to go out to bars and clubs and play snooker with her boyfriend and listened to the Shangra laws. So she played me some of those records, which turned into a crash course in girl group productions. And the thing that struck him first about those tracks was the drama. He later said in the two eighteen Classic Albums documentary about Back to Black, that those really sixties pop songs were selling heartbreak on this giant scale, like the world is going to end if my boyfriend doesn't take me back. It's so annoying to me that that Walking in the Sand has become a tiktop meme because that song is like do metal like when that kicks in, And that's the song that she played him that stuck in his head, that became back the piano part to Back to Black. I'm going to punch that in later whatever happens to ah Amy said something similar in an interview in the lead up to the Grammys in two thous So many songs today are like you don't know me, I don't need you, But back then it was more like I don't care if you don't love me. I will lie down in the road, I will pull pull out my heart and show it to you. So that was the stuff that she was into. How this should not surprise anyone. H After she left, Mark spent the night in his studio trying to come up with some sort of instrumental track to play for her. And that's when he came up with the piano figure that will become the verse to back to Black. That piano part feels very shamer Laws walking in the sand, as you mentioned. Uh. And then he added a drum pattern that is sort of reminiscent of be My Baby, the how Blaine, the most iconic drum intro of all time. Maybe that'll give me some angry comments. Uh. He was not coordinated enough to do the bass and snare at the same time. Uh, So he took the mallet off the foot pedal and just played it with his hands, um, which is you know, it worked. And then he built it up some more over percussion, uh, tambourine with caked in reverb word. Yeah, well, I mean that's that's part of those Motown stems. You know. You forget how those like an indispensable part of those Motown tracks with the auxiliary percussion. You had all those guys who grew up playing tambourine and church. There's you know, the chimes, bells on it, shakers and uh, you know probably what did he probably throw on there, like probably a mid filter and some tape emulator plug ins and the piano. There's a great if you care, which I can't imagine you do, but he did something for the BBC. I think it's called Maestro and it was like a ten minute YouTube clip of it where he actually like literally just sits down with the stems on pro tools and goes through each filter that he used and like how he assembled it. It's it's interesting even if you don't, you know, care so much about the specific final product. It's just to see how he manipulates these sounds that he really just made like in his a little crappy studio and made it sound like these wall of sound style U Wagnerian. You know Seth who recorded the theme song for for this po. This very podcast. Uh, same, same mold. I mean that kings dude, like, there's you know, welcome to the plug in portion of this program. Well, I just want to say because it's it's funny, like some of that gear stuff is interesting because it is these sounds that become highly sought after that are intrinsically Yeah. Yeah. Blake Mills, who is like a really sought after guitarist producer right now, buys these old movie projectors. He rewires them to use them as amps and preamps because of the guts of them cover your tone in such a way that people like, it's just so fascinating to me. Man, it's just people reverse engineering old junkie stuff to get that vibe to it. And as we will mention as the DAP tones later on, we're like, no, we will not do that. We will record directly to tape anyway. Thus concludes the plug in portions. Um so Amy arrives back at the studio the following day and he plays it for her, and Ronson told Fader she really didn't get animated about anything ever. She just had this dead stare. So I thought what I did didn't work, and then she just looked at me. And said, I love it. That's what I want my whole album to sound like. So she stayed for another five days, just me and her, and in that time they worked on the song's rehab, back to Black. You know, I'm no good. Love is a losing game. Wake up alone and he can only hold her. He said. It would usually start with her playing him songs on her nylon string guitar, and then he would get the chords from that, and then she would leave for the night and he would quote go nuts with the arrangements. But the whole process was done in just a few days, and Mark would say it was the quickest he'd worked on any record. He later told an Emmy, I always think, damn, I wish it did take longer because I would have more memories. It was just so quick. That is sad and an he made Uptown Funk my least favorite song of all time except for American Pie. Oh, I actually like I'm town fun. Obviously, back to Black was the crucial song of the session. You know, it's the title track that provided something of a mission statement to the cathartic proceedings. The backing track is like an updated version of Phil spector's wall of Sounds, complete with funeral bells tolling at the end. In the video, she stands over a grave marked by a tombstone that reads R I P. The Heart of Amy Winehouse, which was subsequently edited out after her death for obvious reasons. After Mark Ronson played her that rough verse section that he put together, which if you listen to it, it's really just loops throughout the entire song. That's only dynamics that really signify the shift of the chorus. Amy burned it to a CD and went to the back room at the studio and spent an hour writing lyrics. And the Amy documentary has a shot of the lyric sheet and it's just covered with hearts like a teenage girl's notebook. It just kills me. Originally, when she came in to sing what she into Mark, She's sang the bit we only said goodbye with words I died a hundred deaths, which you later changed that I died a hundred times. Mark offered a little bit of producer lee direction. He said, I was like producer one on one. The words rhyme and the chorus they have to her won't be a hit. Amy was so serious about her words, though, and she just looked at me like I was crazy, Like why would I fix that? That's what came out, that's honestly on paper, and uh so it stayed, and he later observed that song back to Black has some of the most unlikely lyrics you could ever imagine in a massive pop single. And there's footage of Amy recording I think it's the final take actually in the Amy documentary from and it's a mind blowing not only that it exists, but just to watch. It's just so funny to hear her sing the phrase kept his dick wet in that perfect Billie Holiday voice. Just great. Ronnie Specter, after Amy died, recorded a version of back to Black in tribute to her, and she she couldn't bring herself to sign that line. I think she changed to kept his thing wet. I believe justn't much better, but I guess it's okay. Now we got to talk about Rehab, which is my least favorite track on the album. So it's admittedly the one that made her a commercial artist in a household name, which ultimately you could actually argue is part of her downfall. So one of her more poignant quotes in the Amy documentary is when she's asked earlier in her career if she thinks she'll ever be famous, and she says, no, my music is not on that scale. I don't think i'll be famous. I couldn't handle it. I'll go mad. This is very sad to hear in retrospect. So maybe the song rehabits her undoing um actually came from a conversation that Amy had with Mark ronson what e were taking a break from these early sessions and going for a walk. I guess they were walking around downtown looking for a present for Amy's new boyfriend, this guy Alex Claire, who wasn't in the picture for long, and she started filling Mark in on her ex Blake. You know, the guy inspired all these songs. It was kind of natural that the topic would come up, and she specifically talked about the extremely rough period after their breakup in two thousand five, when she spiraled into a deep depression and her friends went to her house after I think she fell over and hit her head after drinking, and they said it was like a squatter lived there. It was just clear that she had a serious problem. Her parents didn't really want to know or get involved. So her manager essentially kidnapped her and drove her to the middle of nowhere I think, like literally in the woods and begged her to go to rehab. And eventually, just like the song says, she said she'd go if her dad thinks she should, and they had a famous meeting with her father where he declared her fine and that she didn't need to go to rehab. Her father, Mitch, who's kind of a kind of a character in the I was gonna say, he's like the other big male villain in her life, right, Yeah, kind of shamefully indulged in. He was a cabby, but he had singing aspirations of his own. And there, of course some who kind of felt that, I mean a lot of he was the guy who kind of turned her onto all the stuff she loved, all the jazz stuff, Sarah Van Dinah Washington and all the great Motown stuff. But yeah, there's some who feel that he kind of tried to ride her coat tails to get something of his own off the ground. Um, yeah, no position to judge, I'm not a father, but yeah, there there's seemed to have have been some questionable choices made by by this man, and one of them was declaring that Amy was fine. I didn't need to go to rehab. She said that she was drinking too much because she was young and because she was love sick and you quote can't go into rehab for that. Um and as her manager that wanted kidnapped her and tried to help later said this was the moment we lost a very key opportunity. She wasn't a star, she wasn't sworn by paparazzi, and she might have been able to work on herself, you know, alone before a world wanted a piece of her. But alas it was not to be. So apparently Amy's draw ping this whole story on Mark Ronson as they're out for a walk, and to hear Amy tell it, she sang the hook out loud, just on the spot as a joke. You know, no, no, no at all, and she told this is her talking to the Daily Mail in two thousand and seven. It was quite silly, really, I sang the whole line exactly as it turned out on the record. Mark laughed and asked me who wrote it, because he liked it. I told him I just made it up, and that it was true, and he encouraged me to turn it into a song, which took me five minutes. It wasn't hard, it was about what my old management company wanted me to do. Mark Mark does the chuck chuck. It's your cousin, Marvin Winehouse. His face lights up when he hears this, you know, this hook that she sings, and he admittedly feels bad about it. Later he's talking to Zane Low. He said, She's telling me all this horrible stuff and I'm supposed to be like, Wow, how was that for you? And instead I'm like, we've got to go back to the studio. Yeah, that's there's so many thorny conversations about like what's like what do you do? I mean, it's always trickier with ours because like, nominally, that's their entire existence is mezing their life into the thing that you are there to support them in, you know, the thing that like you exist in an infrastructure, if you're a manager, if you're a label, if you're a producer, to help them create that stuff, and if they are using their deep well of sadness and pain to create that stuff. There's always the ongoing dialogue with everyone around it, like well, should we be enabling this? But like if we don't, are we out of a job? Because like you know, they talk about that with I mean, this is a out of left field comparison, but like they talk about with like that with a grateful debt, like so many people whose livelihoods were tied up in getting Jerry back out on the road when he was deeply unhealthy and didn't want to do it anymore and was really in no shape to do it, and it was it was this unhealthy lifestyle. But they were like, dude, there's like thirty people who feed their families off Elvis being out there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, same deal. I mean they would like he would be barely coherent. And a story that somebody is an entourage tells of like Elvis is horizontal basically in his hotel room before he has to go to a show, and Colonel Tom Parker comes up there and with the tour doctor, and the guy's thinking, oh great, like the old man's here, he'll see what's really going on. He'll be able to put a stop to this and see what rough shape Elvis is in. And then he goes into the room and sees that they're dunking Elvis's head in like a champagne thing of ice, and Jesus, Colonel Tom Parker just says, the only thing that matters is that that man gets out on the stage tonight. Nothing else matters. And that was the environment. I mean, that's something that's yeah. I mean, it could still be going on for all I know, but I think that, you know, Amy's death might have had a hand in sort of dismantling or at least taking a chunk out of that kind of insidious is them fingers cross? But yeah, they after they're going for their walk, they went back to the studio and they turned their conversation into a song and it was initially an acoustic twelve bar blues kind of thing. Done it a really slow tempo, and Mark put on his producer's cap and said, yeah, that's cool, but how about we put a beat behind it and speed it up. And Mark Rotson had a radio show on East Village Radio, which in college I desperately wanted to join, Oh my God, and he played demos of Rehab and you know, I'm no good on these shows, making him the first DJ to play both Biggie's Hypnotize and Dammy Winehouse's rehab, I guess um and she used to accompany them to these shows when she was in town. And Mark told this great anecdote to The Fader a few years back. We got on so well. She would come with me to the East Village Radio on Fridays to do my show. She would hang out for ten minutes to get bored, and then go next door to the tattoo parlor and get a tattoo. I thought maybe I should stop inviting her, because I would feel guilty if she got a tattoo that she didn't really love one day. She was overtly sexual and playful, but there was never a notion that something was really going to happen. One time, I must have fallen asleep. We had this little bench and I woke up and my head was in her lap, and she was just stroking my hair as if I were her little boy. Their friendship is very sweet. I do like that. But yeah, despite the very hooky chorus, neither Amy or Mark that the song was an obvious hit. And Ronson recalls playing it for the Island Records and our management for the first time, and he said, about fifteen seconds in they all said rewind rewind, but I didn't think they were going to be dollar signs lighting up. It's it's good to give an artist the story. I think that that gave Amy a narrative, you know, as opposed to just like a cool hit song, it happens with a dell too. I think it's always better to have a hit with a song that's not only catchy and also displays a tremendous amount of vocal virtuosity, but also gives you a background into whatever is happening. And I mean Rumor has got a great example. If you've got the element of a compelling story in there as well as a catchy chorus, you're gonna have a monster. As a sad aside, About a year after the song was released, Amy actually did go to rehab. It was in August two seven. She entered the Causeway Retreat with her new husband and fellow addict, Blake Fidler and addition, specialists know that admitting a couple to rehab together is a bad idea, but the Causeway, for whatever reason, let it happen. And perhaps not coincidentally, the Causeway facility was shut down following numerous ethical violations in and in the Amy documentary, Blake has shown at the facility just badgering Amy, shoving a video camera interface while they're in rehab, asking her to sing the new updated version of rehab as a joke, and she refuses. I know we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more too much information in just a moment. Enter the Dap Kings from somewhere Sunny. After Amy recorded these rough cuts, Ronson was using, by his own admission, every computer trick in the book to get that vintage sound. And that's when he realized that the answer wasn't a computer at all. The real vintage sound was the free made along the way the Dap Kings. I said earlier on Twitter to you that that I would cut off my left pink, no right pinky, the one I don't need to go back in time and be in the Dap Kings. Man, Oh my god. I mean they are monsters, every single one of them players, but they are also just I don't know, do they're like archivists of a lot of overlooked figures in soul. I mean they started with Lee Fields. They found Sharon Jones, who was a prison guard and did you ever see that documentary about Charles brad Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh he found a monster and they found him when he was singing James Brown covers and they would just find anyway. I'm getting sorry that I saw Charles Bradley, not knowing who he was. He was at some festival and he just came. I was covering the vestil for work, and I didn't really want to be there. It was all like, you know, there's no name. I could say it right now, that wouldn't be offensive, so I'm just not gonna say anything, just all acts I didn't really care about. And then he comes on and I thought James Brown had risen from the dead. It was unbelievable. It's like sixties something year old. Man. Have I showed you that my Sharon Jones video. You've never showed it to me. You've told it to me, and I never will. It's just for me. Um. I saw her at a book signing right, yes, well it was a book event. I was like front row and she pulled me up on stage and she was like, you've been uh, get up here, man. She was an institution anyway, So these guys, they basically we're all just sold fiends and they got together and they were recording. As I mentioned, Lee Fields and we're just like analog dorks man. They recorded out in Bushwick when bush Wick was still like not a place that you went in a basement to tape analog boards. Their basis. Gabe Roth said, show me a computer that sounds as good as a tape machine, and I'll use it. They recorded this studio that they called the House of Soul. All the rhythm tracks, drums, piano, guitar based all in one room. The drums were recorded on one microphone. It's so good. I mean, do you ever visit there? No, No, I never knew any of them, I mean, or cross paths with any because they were already like celebrities by the time I've got to you know, I got to New York. But well we'll get again. Cart ahead of the horse. Um Mark Ronson had heard a Sharon Jones track and he played it to Amy, who said, it's the Nuts, which was not of British Ism. I was familiar, you know, it's the dogs, Bullocks. It's the same, it's I think it's sure, but yeah, there was a home run. They were the perfect band and Amy wasn't even at the sessions with them, which is kind of sad because I'm sure she would have loved that, and because she was already back in London, and the guys in the DAP Kings just they had no idea that they were working on a record of this scope. Um the fact that she was already a known quantity in the UK didn't mean anything to them. The older names are so damn funny to me. Band leader Blinky grip Tite later said, we didn't have a clue about her already being a star. She probably told us that, but we were like, whatever, her name ain't Marva Whitney. So we did it and it was done. And this is the thing that gets into this whole conversation about any artists, any white person making black music. And a lot of music in the United States is black music, and I include myself in that, and you know, you try to have reverence for it, and you try to recognize where you're getting the stuff from. But there is an element of chair picking when it comes to what happened with this band, and and Sharon Jones in particular. That was the good thing, the cool thing about the DAP Kings a bunch of the white guys who were making period accurate funk music. Is that they use their resources to put these older artists on and in Sharon and Charles Bradley and Lee Fields, these guys case give them a second act that they richly deserved, you know, a second chance. Really they never had a first act and a professional yeah, and so you get this rich compared to them, at least rich white girl from the UK literally flying in and taking their band and their sound, making a whole bunch more money on it than they ever did. H Sharon Jones was not thrilled initially, at least, she told The New York Times in two thousand seven, we were just sitting here minding our own business, doing not a little forty fives and albums, and all of a sudden they were like, I want your sound. And then Amy would call on the DAP Kings for live gigs when they were touring the US, and that came at the expense of them being available for Sharon the other artists on DAP Tomb and Uh. Sharon admitted as much. I mean, she told The Times, first, I feel kind of angry about it, but if it took Amy to get the Dap Kings heard. Then it's a good thing. I say, it's great. Thank you. Back to Black put dap tone on the map is one of the most important labels, soul or otherwise, and it brought that kind of retro leaning soul into the mainstream in a big way. But as author Jessica Lipsky note in her book about the label, it ain't retro Daptone Records and the twenty one century soul Revolution, it did not trickle down to people like Sharon Jones, Charles Bradley Leefield's um Naomi Shelton and the Gospel Queens or another great band on that on that label, uh Blinky Grip Tight, and some of the other players appreciated that Back to Black was, in his words, a flying que two pop trends, and also admired Amy for being unapologetically herself. She was on that zero given before that term was coined, and there's a passage from her book that we will quote here. But Sharon Jones had also been on the zero given tip for years as an older frontwoman competing for audiences with singers half her age, only to have one of those singers swoop her support system right from under her nose. Amy made a ten million selling record, and we were just trying to sell like a hundred thousand with Sharon. Dap King guitarist Tom Brannick notes his frustrated acceptance still audible. During the Back to Black sessions, Jones looked at wine House and the Dap Kings with a sense of impending doom and lapsed loyalty. Was she going to lose her band to an artist with broader appeal, deeper pockets, and a producer who recognized the canned magic of the Dap Kings. Jones was angry and early on indignant. I'm old enough to be Amy Winehouse's mother. How am I supposed to take a backseat to that child? She questioned? Eventually, Yeah, Eventually, and with significant reassurance from her fellow musicians, Jones recognized the boon wine, the success, and a relationship with Mark Ronson could be for Dap Tones wider appeal. With a little prodding, she regularly thanked both for recognizing the Dapkins soul power during interviews. Jones also understood the need to put her own album on pause while the wine House business ran its course. But Tom Brennett concedes that Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings attempt to ride wine houses coattails only worked indirectly. How could you tap into a young audience with forty nine year old Sharon Jones? Well, if they have years, you could. Wine House and Sharon Jones meant during a two thousand eight Dap Kings and Sharon Jones performance at the Jazz Cafe in London, and they spent close to an hour talking jones dressing room. In an interview with The New Yorker, Jones accounted, I don't even want to talk about it. Instead of people laughing at her, pray for her. Drugs are so horrible. The Dap King's attitude at their sudden and somewhat controversial notoriety can be summed up in this anecdote. When they received a framed platinum record for their work on Back to Black, which signifies over a million sales in the US, they hung it above the toilet in the upstairs bathroom of their studio. Bassist Gabriel Roth said, it was the only free space we had. Take that how you will, but there was a very nice code of the adapt tone story. We mentioned earlier than Amy wasn't actually present for the sessions with adapt Kings, and she didn't actually meet them until after Back to Black came out in the fall of two thousand and six, when she came to the US to make promotional appearances. The deap Kings stood in for her English band, and she hit it off with the guys immediately, and she even went out to Bushwick to visit them at the House of Seoul or studio, which is just crazy for me now because it's a pretty nondescript building in a pretty nondescript area that just happens to be like a ten minute walk from my apartment. So the thought of like Amy Winehouse walking around my neighborhood is really weird to me. Mark Ronson later told The Village Voice it was one of the last times I remember her just being unencumbered by any threat of drama or press or Papa Razzi. And it was later that day when she visited them at the House of Soul that they recorded her version of Valerie by the British fan the Zutons and Mark Ronson was doing an album of covers of contemporary songs, which was a cool idea because mostly you have albums of covers of old school songs that were you know, revamped, So this was just fresh takes on stuff like Britney Spears, Toxic and a cold Play songs on there that the Dap Tones did as an mental version. Uh God, put a smile on your face. I think that album is great version. It's called um and he wanted Amy to contribute, which she said was a struggle for her because she didn't listen to anything after nineteen seven A Woman after My Old Heart. But eventually she suggested Valerie, which had been a hit in the UK in the summer of two thousands six. Apparently she had a bit of a pub spat with the guy and the Zutons, and before things escalated, she let it go when she realized who this guy was and that he had written the song that she actually liked. He told the enemy recently that moment was very personal. I like to think it's what pushed to record the song herself. Maybe something good camp of that stupid argument, and the Dap King spent an entire day working up kind of a slow version of that song, sort of like a Curtis Mayfield cut, which again I keep mentioning it surfaced on the posthumous Lioness album, which is a bunch of rarities, but at the end of the session, Mark Ronson suggested that they pick it up a bit and try a version of was a little bit more upbeat, more motowning, with a rhythm section part that was reminiscent of the Jams song A Town called Malice Boo Boo Boo boo. But it's got the same tempo, the same like bass thump the a Dap King's drummer Homer Steinweiss later said, somewhat tartly, that type of beat is not something we ever did. That tempo is more like the Strokes or something. So they did one final up tempo take, seemingly just as an afterthought, and that became the one. It was released in two thousand seven, and that was I think one of Amy's biggest charting hits, at least in the States. That's my favorite. Yeah, that's a good one. The Dap Kings played a few gigs with Amy in the States as part of the Back to Black launch, but sadly, I don't think they ever worked it through again after this, I know, considering his master stroke of getting the Dap Kings to play on her record. You would have thought that Amy would have trusted Mark Ronson when he said that he wanted to add some strings, but you'd be wrong. You may recall four hours ago earlier in this episode that Amy hated, hated, hated the strings that were added to her debut album, Frank, and she immediately shut down the conversation every time Mark suggested strings for Back to Black. He later told The Fader, I said, Amy, the Shangri Laws, the Phil Specter stuff you love. It's the orchestra that's doing a lot of the work. And she was like, no, I think hate it. It's Disney bullsh I wish I could do an Amy Winehouse voice. He even offered to pay for the strings out of his own pocket, promising to remove them from the tracks if she hated them, but to no avail. So he had to get sneaky, and he likes to joke in interviews. I didn't really do them behind her back. I just thought, let's add strings behind her back. And the first song that they mixed back in London was Love is a Losing Game, one of my favorite songs in the album, and torch song if there ever was one which was adorned with very tasteful moody strings. And Mark Ronson recalled and mojo. She had her head down on the mixing board, so I couldn't gauge your reaction. I'm freaking out thinking if she doesn't like it, We're pretty At the end of this, she looks up and walks over, extends her arms and gives me a big hug. I love it. Just take the harp off the second verse. It sounds like some Mariah carry bull. It's emblematic of this thing about Amy. She can cut you down the size and two seconds flat. You know. Amy was initially asked to do the Bond theme to a Quantum of soulis the Bond movie, and and I guess Mark Ronson said that they had recorded um some demos for it. He'd written a song for it. I think he wrote it by himself, and they've done some demos for it. But she this was really when she was in a dark period and she kind of just stopped showing up and it was abandoned and they got Jack White and Alicia Keys to do another Way to Die. You know. It's just I know, and Jack White took advantage of it because he knew that they were like hard Press, they needed a song like fairly immediately, and so he was like, oh, like, they're not gonna get somebody else, so I'm just gonna put in some stuff that's really like unusual for a Bond theme, and they're not gonna have time to really like make me go back and redo it. So that's why it's such a kind of a weird Bomb theme. It's a pretty I think it's been called like the most divisive Bond theme that there is. I like it. A lot of people hate it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I like it. It's no it's no Skyfall, it's no Living Let Die, it's no Goldfinger. There's so many other good pun You Only Live Twice is my favorite. I don't really know where else to fit this, but I love that Amy always did the final listens of her songs to the speakers and her father, Mitch's cab, you know he said earlier as a cabby, And she always had the engineers or whoever burned what they've done to a CD so she could play it in this car, because she knew that was how most people would be listening to her music. Brian Wilson used to do that too. Yeah, I was gonna say, I wonder if she got that from Motown because that was what Barry Gordy had A had a like car speaker set up in his office so he could listen everything on that way. That's such a smart idea. I love that. Back to Black was released on October two thousand six. It quickly went multi platinum uh most places. It was the best selling album of two thousand seven in the UK, is currently the second best selling album of the twenty one century in Britain, just behind of Course, Adele, and the twelve best selling album of all time over there. The title track was peeking in the charts in the spring of two thousand seven, about the same time that Amy reunited with Blake married him in a small ceremony in Miami. The song would re enter the charts at its highest position of number eight after her death in two thousand eleven. In the US, the album debut at number seven on Billboard, becoming the highest debut chart entry for an album by British female solo album if I record broken a week later by Joss Stone, but so Yeah, Back to Back was launched in the US in January two thou seven with a performance at Joe's Pub in the East Village backed by the dap Kings, attended by Dr John, Most Deaf and jay Z. My door was like right around the corner. I don't know why, I do know why I didn't go. I had no idea what was happening, but oh that hurts. I would love to have been there. One of my worst didn't spend the money gigs was Dr John at Bam when he read or he did that record with Dan Auerbach that record smokes and then he yeah. Her debut single over here was you Know I'm No Good with a guest feature by ghost Face Killer. E W named it the second best song of the year under Brihanna's umbrella Yeah Uh. In the US, Rehab had a remix with jay Z, and presumably the label thought that her whole jazz soul girl group retro thing wasn't going to play well over here, and they were positioning her to be a kind of chorus hook singing artist. The interesting thing about that is that in the Amy documentary, she leaves a voicemail on salam Remy's phone talking about coming up with battle raps. Those are her words, and considering that as a future direction. Possibly probably she was kidding, but you know still, uh, we just talked about the bomb theme. I would love to hear whatever demos of that exists, but Mark Ronson has said that it would take quote a miracle of science to finish it, so sadly, it seems like we're not gonna hear that anytime soon. And Bruce Willis was notably such a fan that he insisted on introducing her when she performed Rehab at the two thousand seven MTV Movie Awards. That is a two thousand seven sentence ghost face killer Bruce Willis, Bruno Toffy. Remember Bruce Willis's record was called The Return and he did a song with the Temptations and they're like backing him, and you could see on all their faces they're just like, what the hell is this? Like, we're back in this guy. Amy Winehouse was nominated for six Grammys at the fiftieth Annual Grammys in two thousand eight, including the Big Four Album of the Year, Song of the Year for Rehab, Record of the Year for Rehab, and Best New Artist, as well as the Best Pop Vocal Album and Best Female Vocal Performance. She won five, tying her for the record at the time for most Grammys one in a single night by a female. Would that have been Nora Jones? H a bunch? I think Lauren Hill quite a few at one five before? Shockingly, the only Grammy she lost was Album of the Year. What was it? This one's for all the marbles. That's a great question. I are you pulling it up? Um? Okay, so wait a minute. This would have been two thousand. It's it's not what you think it is. Sounds Nope, give me the smallest hint you can. Clive Davis bait. Oh is it some kind of Alicia Keys album? Close? I don't know. It was Rivers the Joni Letters by Herbie Hancock that one Album of the Year. Sure did No. I don't believe you. I don't believe you. It's terrible looking at it in retrospect. The other nominees were Foo Fighters and Vince Gill and then Graduation so In by Kanye So in retrospect we would have thought it would be Back to Black or Graduation, But that is correct. Herbie Hancock's album of cover of Joni Mitchell songs featuring Leonard Cohen and Nora Jones. But that's the Karn Bailey Ray record was a great album or whatever. That Karinn Bailey Ray that's the least indicative album of two thousand eight or seven or whatever year was that I could possibly imagine? Yeah, how about that? Okay? I I didn't think this would hit me so deep. Um Famously, Amy was barred from entering the United States due to legal issues surrounding her drug use, so for the first time, the Grammys had a performance beamed in via satellite, which gives an indication of how important she was at the time. The look of genuine shock on her face in the clip where she wins Record of the Year by her idol Tony Bennett. It's it's a lot to take in. Have you seen it? I think you sent it to me at one point, and yeah, I watched it. It's it's it's hard. Yeah, it's so sweet. Yeah. Yeah. If this anecdote is too hard, free, I can take this one. Yeah, you gotta do it. That's a that's a that is a literary gut punch. Yeah, you think that this would be the best night of her life. She's made Grammy history without even having to leave London. She's being honored by her hero, Tony Bennett. Her parents are right there in front of her breakup album as a hit all over the world, and she even reunited with the guy who inspired it and they are now married. But one of her childhood best friends had a different view of the night. Just after winning these awards, Amy waved her over and she expected Amy to gush with happiness, but instead she just said, this is so boring without drugs, And to me, that might just be the saddest anecdote in this entire story. Nothing fills that hole, Yeah, exactly. There is a that's a continue with the emotional pile on. There is a bone chilling title card at the end of the two thousand eighteen classic Albums documentary on Back to Black to Meet. It's up there with Hemingway's six words short story baby Shoes in terms of succinct devastation. You know, for sale, baby shoes never worn. This is just as much of a of a very succinct gut punch. Back to Black has sold sixteen million albums. Amy and Blake got back together in two thousand seven. Amy never made another album. She died in two thousand eleven. What a it's on an epitaph, but what a cold hard facts are unusually cold and hard. We can't go out on such a downer. Uh. In addition to giving renewed commercial viability to soulful singers like a Dale, Florence Welch, Sam Smith, Little Boots, Duffy Pluma, Faith and you Can't Even Know You Lana del Rey, Amy songs inspired a host of covers across the genre. Beyonce and Andre three thousand covered to Black for bos Lerman's Great Gatsby Remake, a cover that Amy's father, Mitch aided, saying that Beyonce didn't bring anything to it, that's his quote, and grumbled that he wasn't asked permission. Prince used to sing love as a losing game during his gigs, and uh Amy once joined him on stage to perform it together, which I think is cool. And the great rockabilly pioneer Wanda Jackson did you know I'm no good? That song rips? You should hear that. That one's great. And Ronnie Specter recorded a version of back to Black subbing in a new Word for Dick in the verse, which I love. Um. I think that's a beautiful bee Hive to bee Hive tribute to a young woman who looked up to her very much. After all this, I feel like we should give Amy the final word. She once said, I wrote an album that I'm really proud of about a bad situation that I got through, And that's pretty much where it begins and ends for me, taking something ugly and making something beautiful that gives hope to others. I uh, I can't think of a better way to use art. Well said, do a wellness check on everybody listening right now. It's really no sunny face to put on this episode. That's usually our job here, but just go listen to the music. Yeah, oh my god, Yeah, that's why it's there. Well, folks, thank you for listening. This has been too much information. I'm Alex Hegel and I'm Jordan Runtalk. We'll catch you next time. Too Much Information was a production of I Heart Radio. The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan run Talk. The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder. June. The show was researched, written, and hosted by Jordan run Talk and Alex Hegel, with original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra. If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. For more podcasts on iHeart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite show. And as atent that that nan at black Fast int