First one: Keb Darge. Definitely a story here. Photographed at his house in London. And the circumstances were really interesting ’cause I’d known about Keb for years before I met him, known his records. And basically his records are the ones that really introduced me to funk, or what he calls “deep funk.” Which is kind of like a really raw, basic kind of funk—so nothing like James Brown, or Sly and the Family Stone, or anything like that. It’s more like a straight, raw version of it. Bass, drums, funky guitar. So I got to know him through his compilations: Keb Darge’s Legendary Deep Funk, and then he did some other stuff with The New Mastersounds, which is like a funk revival band.

So it was maybe two years after I started the project that I started thinking: How do I go beyond? Who do I want to feature that I never thought I could reach? ’cause, you know, he was kind of like an idol for me. I had learned so much about him, but to me, he was always “the DJ from the records,” you know? And I found out that my friend Jamison Harvey—you know, DJ Prestige—he had a direct contact to him through another friend in the U.K., Andy Smith, who used to have a weekly DJ night with him at Madame Jojo’s.

Then in 2009, I went back to Israel to visit my friends and family and, like always, I took a layover somewhere and this time it was in London. And that night, when I took the flight, there was the volcano eruption in Iceland!

Ah ha!

I managed to take off from New York, but I remember already hearing in the news about the eruption, and no one knew what was gonna happen. So I landed in London, but maybe 20 minutes too late. I rushed to my next departure gate, but they shut it down. Like, my connecting flight took off, but I couldn’t get on it because my first flight was late because of the volcano alert. So I was really one of the first of so many people who got stranded in London. I was there for a week! Of course I didn’t know how long it would be, so I said, Alright, let’s make something good out of this. I emailed Jamison and asked if he could reach out to Keb, see if I could go and visit him. He did that and Keb replied immediately and said, “Yeah, come over. It’s perfect timing because I’m packing all my shit and am about to move to the Philippines with my new wife Edith!”

Holy shit!

So the next day, I went to his house. In London, I don’t remember exactly where it was. But he wasn’t kidding! He was packing all his shit. All his records, all his 7-inches. So nothing was set up; in the photo, it was actually like this. He was sitting in the middle and all these crates and travel bags were surrounding him and he was sorting them out and trying to make some kind of order in the entire mess. It was cool; I was really impressed—the guy is moving out, and he’s investing all this money and energy in packing up all his records and taking them with him.

Keb is… He’s a character. I mean, I always heard stories about how wild he is… I remember when um… Yeah, I don’t actually know if I should say that one. [laughs] Let’s just say that when he DJs, he doesn’t go for a toilet break. At all.

Hmm…

He has his own way of dealing with that, his own way of doing things. But what can I say? The guy looked totally in love with his wife. She was always teasing him, like, “Hey, this is my record!” or “I’m gonna take this record and DJ myself!” ’cause he taught her how to DJ. She’s this tiny little Filipina and he’s into martial arts, karate I think. At one point, he pulled out a Japanese sword and, like, starting using me as a living practice dummy!

That’s amazing.

Yeah. I don’t know, I trusted him. He looked sharp. I think he’s like 50-something. He’s so skinny; he looks really healthy, you know? And only years later, I discovered that he’s kind of a champion in disco dancing.

No way. This gets better and better.

I guess it comes with the athletic body. Musically, I wanted to talk to him about what I knew him for—he was a legend, you know? I wanted to talk about funk records. But he was totally not into it. He was done with funk. He told me, “I can’t do this anymore; I’m into rockabilly now.” And I guess most of the session with him was around rockabilly records.

Wow. So what’s actually going on in this moment? Is he air guitaring?

Oh yeah—he’s strong into air guitaring. That’s the beauty of it: he cannot hide his enthusiasm, like a child. And this is his charm, you know? He just goes off about things and doesn’t give a shit.

That’s great.

Another thing, now that I’m staring at the photo, I’m seeing this empty sleeve, and it makes me think, Okay, what the hell was he playing here? I’m sure I have it somewhere. I taped the entire interview ’cause you know, usually I email people a Q&A but I knew that with him, I’d probably see it in ten years, so I recorded it. But then I tried to listen to it and couldn’t understand a word!

Oh, because of his accent?

Yeah, his accent. So again, I asked Jamison if he wanted to try to transcribe the interview and he agreed. It took him like ten days to decipher the recording, but he did a good job. The interview’s not out [on the D&G website] yet, but it will be sometime soon.

Is he originally from London?

No, he’s Scottish.

Oh, that would make it harder to understand, yeah.

Couldn’t you tell from the pineapple shirt? Totally Scottish, right?

I missed that entirely.

I think secretly, the one thing I was really digging with Keb was his Hawaiian shirt collection. He’s got the best ones ever. He makes a Hawaiian shirt look too cool.