Jonathan Galkin (DFA Records)
"Almost everyone on the label was from somewhere else, whether that was New Jersey or California, and all of these disparate origins and collective experiences shaped what DFA became."
I would love to say that I first learned about Jonathan Galkin in the context of DFA Records, the impossibly cool dance-punk label he co-founded and managed for nineteen years, but that would be a lie. I am the exact right age to have come home from elementary school every day, parked myself in front of the TV, and watched him star as Jake Decker in Nickelodeon’s Hey Dude, a children’s sitcom set on a dude ranch. Yippie-tai-aie-ay.
Many years later, I heard “House of Jealous Lovers” by the Rapture, an early DFA release which, to me, remains one of the best 12” singles in that medium’s history. Enchanted, I dug deeper and kept an eye on their new releases: LCD Soundsystem (inarguably the label’s best-known act), Hercules and Love Affair (my personal favorite), Juan Maclean, Black Dice, Hot Chip, YACHT. I can’t remember exactly when or how I realized that the guy running the label was fucking Jake Decker, but I can tell you, the information thrilled me to no end.1
I had initially hoped to interview Galkin for my book in the spring of 2021, but after we were introduced by a mutual friend and emailed a little bit about the project, it didn’t pan out. I soon figured out why: After nineteen years of service, Galkin had just been ousted from DFA, which he discussed at length in a (currently paywalled) interview with First Floor’s Shawn Reynaldo that fall. He has since started a new label, FourFour Records, and has also overseen production for several releases on the nonprofit label Red Hot, among other projects.
The dust having settled, I reached out to Galkin recently about picking up where we’d left off. We conducted the interview via email over the course of a few weeks.
I’ll say up front that if you’re looking for juicy gossip about Galkin’s exit from the label, you’re going to be disappointed, because I’m not in the business of shit-stirring. The questions here are mostly the ones I’d hoped to ask in 2021, about his musical background, his arrival in New York, his introduction to the local scene/s, his memories of Plant Bar (a tiny, influential club at 217 East 3rd Street, where DFA’s earliest seeds were sown), and how the city’s transformations impacted his work.
How did you find your way to this music? I'm curious about how you got from Hey Dude to Plant Bar.
It's hard to pinpoint when it started. Definitely early. Elementary school. I had the magical older sibling (s/o Andy !) who has five years on me and was generous when it came to lending me cassettes. I still refer to the holy trinity he handed me in 1984 : Murmur by R.E.M., Ocean Rain by Echo & The Bunnymen, and Treasure by Cocteau Twins. Miraculously, these are still three albums I would firmly place in the Best Ever category 40 years later. These three albums (with a variety of others) set me down this road.
The obsession with music overall started years prior. My Dad is a drummer and I learned by watching him play in our basement in Cranston, Rhode Island. He’d gotten his drums for his Bar Mitzvah in the 1950’s. I had the Grease OST double vinyl in 1978 and played along to that over and over. Its an interesting soundtrack because it's this mix of doo-wop and the then-current disco sounds of the time. Nostalgic. I liked playing in 4/4. And he had a cowbell.
After high school and a weird detour into children’s television, I got to New York in January 1991. I think a lot of it had to do with what I had already experienced [while growing up in] Cleveland and Chicago. It’s not like I arrived on the back of a flatbed truck and got dropped off in Times Square. I am sure I had done my research.
The bands or sounds I was seeking out were all playing in NYC over the course of the next year. It really was down to a Village Voice and a sharpie. I came to NYU through the acting program, but transferred to Gallatin after one semester. I just wanted to take courses in music and film and also intern wherever I could. Over the next few years, that’s all I did.
The received wisdom is often that the ‘90s were a low point for underground music in New York. How accurate is that to your experience? Were there things that were exciting you at the time, or was it all so stale that the feeling was “nothing cool is happening so we’ve got to make our own thing”?
That’s just insane logic. There was so much going on. CBGB was still open. The original Knitting Factory on Houston was open. Maxwells in Hoboken NJ was thriving. Wetlands, Tramps, Brownies - and those are the more mainstream venues. I saw so much live music at the time.
Just recently, an old friend was reminding me of a trip they had made to visit me in NYC in 1992 and explaining how I would methodically grab the latest Village Voice issue and underline/highlight every show for the next 7 days and build a weekly calendar of gigs to see.
I think by the time we started DFA, there was a lack of interesting music coming up. But in hindsight, that was just a brief moment of calm before things kicked off again in 2001. And clearly there were traces of that in Williamsburg in 1999-2000. Luxx was opening, Northsix was opening in 2001.
What attracted you to the scene/community around Plant Bar? How would you place it within the larger context of the city’s music and nightlife landscape at the time?
Plant Bar was a eureka moment for me. Going there early on, seeing Marcus [Lambkin, Shit Robot] deejay and help run a room that was like a bar and nightclub shrunk down to an intimate level. There was an actual deejay booth, so it wasn’t the turntables on top of the bar counter that you might see at a few other places (Black Betty in Williamsburg or Passerby in Manhattan), and a dance floor, both miniaturized.
I also started to clock what congealed into a scene: The members of the Rapture [were] hanging and working there, as well as editors from Vice Magazine (which had just arrived in America about a year prior from Canada). And there were other like-minded deejays, like Dan Selzer, who was less concerned with the fashion of it all and more steeped in music history (i.e. a record collector nerd).
Prior to DFA, were you better versed in the dance side of things, or the indie side? What did you have to teach yourself about, music-wise or scene-wise, once you got involved?
Honestly, it was pretty split down the middle. After Rhode Island, we moved to Shaker Heights outside Cleveland, in 1979. By 6th grade, I was given the aforementioned cassettes. I had lots of good local influences. In middle school I was able to see local high school bands, including groups with a very young [Shudder to Think frontman and soundtrack composer] Craig Wedren and [comedian and filmmaker] David Wain, who were two grades ahead of me, playing covers of the Cure, the Velvet Underground, Yazoo, and a dozen others. I still have a set list [from a show] at the local pool.
I got into Death of Samantha, who were ‘local’ but on Homestead Records. Spike In Vein. The Mice. I started paying attention to these things! Local record shops helped. I was hanging out around Coventry Village in Cleveland and buying a lot of new and used vinyl.
We moved again in 1986 to Highland Park, which is outside Chicago, [and lived there until] 1990. I got very smitten with house music, the dance/industrial Wax Trax sound of things, as well as Big Black. Naked Raygun’s album Throb Throb hit me hard! Big brother Andy was bringing home Marshall Jefferson 12” singles and imported Acid House CD compilations. I made room for it all. I danced a lot at Medusa’s all-ages club nights. I saw a lot of shows at the Metro.
In 90’s NYC, I probably spent more time at indie rock shows than DJ nights. Not hard to do ! But I can say the Creative Time series of shows at the Anchorage / Brooklyn Bridge absolutely rewired my brain.
When we started DFA Records, I had to get familiar with a few things I was not quite up to date on, and that were a lot of the post-hardcore scenes that were happening on the West Coast: labels like GSL, Three One G, and Gravity. This is where a lot of New York bands had roots, including both Black Dice and The Rapture. And I really liked a lot of bands from that scene, like !!!, Gogogo Airheart, Out Hud, Angel Hair and others. I started to connect the dots. Fort Thunder in Providence, RI (my roots!) was another scene I took in as quickly as was even possible in 2001. Out of all these transplants we began to form our own scene.
You mentioned the Creative Time shows. What made them so impactful for you?
It was just exciting to be inside of New York City. Inside the bridge base, up in it’s guts. It was kind of sexual, maybe ? There was a lot of different music happening throughout. A lot of those deejays and producers were collaborating with lighting and visual artists; there were art installations. Sonic Youth played one of the last big events there, maybe for Washing Machine? But mostly it was Drum-‘n’-Bass, Illbient, [and] noise, mixed with art + lights + volume. There were different people set up throughout the space, so it was also experiential. I never thought of it as that at the time, but looking back, that’s what it was.
The early DFA years seem to be very Lower Manhattan-centric (artists like Black Dice notwithstanding), making it arguably the last major scene in the city of which that was true. Is that a fair perception? Why was it able to thrive in Manhattan when so few other musical communities could?
We were based in Manhattan but felt equal parts Brooklyn and NYC. The venues that launched these bands like Subtonic, Mercury Lounge, Brownies, the Cooler, or the aforementioned Plant Bar, [were all in Manhattan]. We all lived in Brooklyn but worked in Manhattan. The building [DFA’s offices] were in was in the West Village [at 225 West 13th Street] and bought by DFA co-owner Tyler Brodie in the late 90’s. I went to NYU with him. It’s how I met James, who was helping design a recording studio in the building.
We were in [Manhattan] because that's where the building was. If Tyler had bought real estate in Brooklyn, that would have been our origin story. I was thrilled regardless because I was living on Bleecker Street at the time we first started, so I could walk to work every day - until I soon made the inevitable move to Brooklyn myself.
Much has been said about Giuliani and Bloomberg’s impact on nightlife in the city during that time, but did their anti-nightlife policies impact your work on the label side of things?
Not that I can recall! Perhaps in retrospect, Plant Bar getting busted for violating the no-dancing cabaret laws spurned a new urgency and sense of danger for any given deejay night. More romantically, maybe it encouraged and inspired parties to head more underground and off the grid. Secretive and smaller - if you know, you know. This was all compounded with 9/11, which brought its own sense of panic to living in the city.
Did you notice the scene change after 9/11?
It absolutely did, but I could never really define [how]. [That day,] I walked a few hundred feet to the corner of my block and watched the towers fall from 7th Avenue and Bleecker Street. I’m probably mentally still recovering to this day. Every morning and evening, I walked back-and-forth to work at DFA on 13th St. and passed St. Vincent’s hospital, and the fences with all the missing person notices.
It’s not like it was just sometimes on my mind. It was literally in my face. The smell of it lasted for a very long time. You couldn’t open your windows.
I have no recollection of sitting around talking about Osama bin Laden. Anxious and sad can also be my default settings, so both were still true at the time of 9/11, just way different. [There was] also the NYC blackout that same year, I think? Good god, I must have been a mess. It was messy.
With all the changes that have occurred in both the city and the music industry since you first entered the music business, how important do you think a label’s geographic location is these days? Is there any reason for a label - or artist, for that matter - to still be based here?
I want to believe it still matters! Especially with indies. Typically, labels grow out of what is local and urgent and happening, and artists need a platform to make it available. Yes, streaming has made the process more democratic and easier. You can go online and have a website take you step by step on how to press your music to vinyl. You can be anywhere in the world to make this happen - your city doesn’t matter - and maybe that is a good thing.
On the flipside, the city or country of origin can be a EZ Pass to skip the discovery line a bit, as well as give some context and dimension to what you are doing. There are exceptions to the rule - and to be clear, New York is a city of transplants. Almost everyone on the label was from somewhere else, whether that was New Jersey or California, and all of these disparate origins and collective experiences shaped what DFA became. It's not the journey, it's the destination. Or vise-versa?
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and context.
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Incidentally, Galkin wasn’t the only early ‘90s Nickelodeon star to reemerge in ‘00s indie rock circles.
I had no idea that he was Jake Decker on Hey Dude. My mind is blown. Another amazing interview!