Q+A: Al Shipley on His Brand New Book on Baltimore Club Music
Interview with a persevering author and journalist!
This week, we’re happy to share an interview with Al Shipley, author of the brand new Tough Breaks: The Story of Baltimore Club Music!
Tamara Palmer/Music Book Club: You open the book by talking about the yearslong journey and labor of love that it took to complete, which is very inspirational! How do you think your narrative benefited from stepping back for a while and then picking it back up?
Al Shipley: I started the project 15 years ago, and that time made a difference in innumerable large and small ways. Then, I was in my late twenties with just a few years of professional writing under my belt, and now I’m in my early forties and much more experienced. I still transcribe all my interviews myself, which is maybe ill-advised, especially since I interviewed dozens and dozens of people for this book. But all my freelancing work kind of built up all the muscles that I had to use here, and in some ways it was more fun to be able to keep expanding and revising on and on, improving each chapter and each paragraph by and by. So often, you simply have to stop writing because you already have the 1,000 words you need for a piece and it’s time to turn it in, even if you have so much more you could say on the subject.
I thought the book was going to span about 25 years but now it’s more like 50, as it eventually felt natural to go back to the beginning of DJ culture and dance clubs in Baltimore in the early ‘70s, long before the local DJs started making house records of their own. The majority of the book still takes place in the ‘90s and 2000s, but it was satisfying to finally tie up the narrative and place the events of the last few years in context – the first Baltimore Club Music Day was declared by the city in 2023, Baltimore tracks were sampled on Cardi B’s “WAP” and multiple Drake songs, young and old DJs are still carrying the torch.
One of the big challenges for me was that there is no single ‘main character’ to focus on, although several people are present and active through all or most of the timeline. I was mindful of giving everyone their due and trying to include people to a degree proportionate to their importance to the genre, although invariably certain people who told me great stories got a little more time in the spotlight. And it helped that it was a genuine scene, not just a handful of artists working in the same area or same era – virtually everyone in this book knew each other and collaborated or spun each other’s music. Music critics often massage the narrative to group people together, but Baltimore has an odd kind of small town vibe to it – people here often jokingly call it ‘Smalltimore,’ every time you meet somebody new, you can just talk about who you know until you figure out what mutual friends you have in common. So club music was this genuine, kind of accidental group effort of many DJs and producers cross-pollinating ideas and responding to and shaping the taste of the people dancing in local clubs. And I found the larger arcs of the narrative by simply collecting all the little details and anecdotes, and then stepping back and finding the patterns and throughlines.
What was your process like to finish the book after you signed on with a publisher? How long did you have?
When I had the original idea for the book, I announced it and did a Kickstarter and raised some funds with the idea of doing it all myself if I didn’t find a publisher. And then I just got really bogged down with life and more immediate necessities and more attainable goals and didn’t finish it, which I found kind of embarrassing for a long time, but all’s well that ends well. Getting the book out into the world last month was a great relief, to have finished what I started, to resolve that tension.
I signed with Repeater Books almost exactly two years ago. The terms were to turn in the book 12 months after the contract was signed, but in that year, both of the people at Repeater that I had been in direct contact with both parted with the company. Since my book changed editors in the middle of the process, I was given some leeway and got a couple extra months to work on it. And then the book’s new editor, Carl Neville, worked with me on the final transcript throughout late 2024 and early 2025 to get it all ready.
I had already written virtually a book’s worth of articles and columns and blog posts about Baltimore club before I even started Tough Breaks. So I had a whole bedrock of interviews and research to rely on, and some outlines and drafts of chapters. But I think I still underestimated how much work it would be to tie it all together and get it to a point where I was happy with it. So that was a very busy, stressful year. I rewrote and restructured over and over, and kept doing more and more interviews, really trying to do right by all these people I’d been interviewing for years. As happy as I was to finish it, part of me just wants to go right back in and keep working on it in case there’s ever an opportunity to do a second edition or another book about club music or Baltimore music. There’s still so many tracks I’d like to get the stories behind.
What surprised you the most when researching the topic?
My favorite surprise was learning the origin of the name of Unruly Records, which is the longest-running and most important label in the scene -- I liken it to the Def Jam of Baltimore club music. Scottie B. and Shawn Caesar are the two main people behind the label, and I just assumed one of them came up with the name, but I never bothered to ask either of them the first few times I interviewed them.
Then, just last year, I asked Scottie about the name, just idly fishing for more details to fill out the narrative, and he explained that his friend Tierre Brownlee always used to use the word “unruly” and suggested calling their new label Unruly Records. I had an interview already scheduled with DJ Tie Be literally the day after Scottie told me that. And I didn’t realize that DJ Tie Be was Tierre Brownlee until he started to tell me the same story. And this had never been published before in any of the dozens of articles about Unruly Records over the years.
So I loved being able to give Tierre some overdue recognition for the role he played in club music history, and he has such a vivid and entertaining way of recalling the old days that I ended up quoting him a lot in the book. He became sort of a major figure in the book in the eleventh hour, and I’m pleased that that happened simply because I kept booking more interviews with anyone willing to talk to me and I kept going back to some of the more important guys like Scottie and digging a little deeper each time.
Is The Wire the TV series GOAT?
I’m comfortable agreeing with that assessment, yeah. I made a list of my favorite TV of the 2000s once and put The Wire at #1, and it would certainly be competitive against my favorite show of any other decade.
People in Baltimore tend to have more mixed feelings about The Wire than you might expect, but I’m a huge fan. When both The Wire and Homicide: Life on the Street before it were in production, it was always exciting to turn a corner and see a camera crew working, or spot a cast member at a movie theater or an event. And beyond the local pride aspect, those are genuinely great, important shows that have something to say about the city, and American life in general.
I was friendly with The Wire’s music supervisor Blake Leyh and helped him get in touch with some artists when he was incorporating more Baltimore music into the later seasons of the show. I was thanked in the liner notes of The Wire’s soundtrack album, that was a really exciting moment for me, to have that little association with this big, beloved thing. A lot of the cool stuff made in Baltimore doesn’t get the recognition it deserves, a recurring theme of the book, so it’s nice to have The Wire to hold up as something that’s recognized just about everywhere as a masterpiece.
What are some of your all-time favorite books about music?
Again, it’s hard to answer that definitively, there are so many I love! I think like a lot of kids who came of age in the ‘90s, Michael Azerrad’s Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana was one of the first books I read about popular music. I’m sure nobody knew that a biography of a band with one successful album would wind up being the essential portrait of a hugely important act. When I was younger I read a lot of entertaining music memoirs by big, outspoken personalities (Miles: The Autobiography by Miles Davis, Crazy From the Heat by David Lee Roth, etc.). And while some musicians have written great books – Elvis Costello’s Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink comes to mind – I came to take a greater interest in books by journalists who can weave the voices of musicians into a larger narrative.
Almost every book I’ve read over the last 15 years was a nonfiction book about music, just knowing it’d be helpful to absorb what I could for Tough Breaks. I came to Baltimore club music more via hip hop than dance music, so I found it really helpful to read some great books about dance music and DJ culture to get a handle on that context – Last Night a DJ Saved My Lifeby Bill Brewster, Energy Flash by Simon Reynolds, The Underground is Massive by Michaelangelo Matos, among others.
Mark Osteen and Frank J. Graziano’s Music At The Crossroads: Lives and Legacies of Baltimore Jazz is an excellent book about a completely different era and genre, and it gave me some real food for thought about the city’s musical history over the last century. Peter Guralnick’s Last Train To Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley and Jonathan Gould’s Otis Redding: An Unfinished Life both have such dense, immersive depictions of Memphis in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Love Goes to Building on Fire by Will Hermes is an engrossing portrait of New York City in the ‘70s. I wanted to put Baltimore in the ‘90s and 2000s on the page in the same way, to give someone a real sense of the time and place whether or not they’ve ever been to Baltimore.
I’m a big fan of the 33 1/3 series, I have dozens of those. Some of my favorites are Aja by Don Breithaupt, The Geto Boys by Rolf Potts, Radio City by Bruce Eaton, and The Who Sell Out by John Dougan.
Jim Ruland’s Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise and Fall of SST Records felt like an instructive read for me. My book has a similar sort of jumble of these unique personalities working on the margins of the music industry with very little money or resources, to create some strange, loud, high-energy music that wound up being really influential – these Baltimore club producers weren’t punk rockers, but they weren’t pop stars either.
Please Kill Me by Gillian McCain and Legs McNeil is a really impressive oral history because it feels remarkably complete with just the words of the interviewees with no additional prose weaving it together. Before I decided to write Tough Breaks, it began with one of my editors at Baltimore City Paper wanting to do a “Baltimore club oral history,” and I suppose we thought it might have that kind of format, but it really doesn’t feel like it ever would’ve been feasible. That was fine with me, because I got to fill in the blanks. Talking to the people that really did it, asking the right questions, and quoting them accurately is the top priority and the most sacred responsibility of making a book like this. I love writing and editorializing and shaping the narrative and forming the connective tissue between the quotes, but it has to be in service of the interviews and letting those musicians have their say.
Previously in our Q+A series:
Paul D. Miller on Lead Belly and Digital Fiction, His Upcoming Book About Algorithms and Music Discovery
Martin Popoff on Guns N’ Roses at 40 and Writing 135 Books
Katie Bain on Her Forthcoming Book Desert Dreams: The Music, Style, and Allure of Coachella
Colin Steven on Publishing Electronic Music and Counterculture Books at Velocity Press
Yoel Gaetán on Chronicling Punk in Puerto Rico with Forgotten Youth Records and Books
Jason Pettigrew on Writing a Book About Ministry's Third Album
Melissa Locker on Her Brand New Book About Oasis Fans
Ira Robbins on Publishing Peter Silverton’s ‘London Calling New York New York’ and What’s Coming from Trouser Press Books
Donna-Claire Chesman on How CRYBABY Came to Her in a Dream
Cary Baker on His First Book and How Busking Can Help Main Street USA
Gina Arnold on The Oxford Handbook of Punk Rock and Working with Academic Publishers
Tom Beaujour on His New Lollapalooza Book and Producing Successful Oral Histories
John Morrison on Boyz II Men and Chronicling Philadelphia Music History
Mark Angelo Harrison on Telling the Spiral Tribe Sound System Story
Lyndsey Parker on Writing a 'Stranger Than Fiction' Memoir with Mercy Fontenot
Christina Ward on Running Feral House, a 36-Year-Old Indie Book Company
Ali Smith on Speedball Baby and Telling Stories Without Shame
Arusa Qureshi on Her Love Letter to Women in UK Hip-Hop
Lily Moayeri on Her Favorite Music Books and Writing from a Personal Place
Megan Volpert on Why Alanis Morissette Matters and Writing 15 Books in 18 Years
Mark Swartz on Biggie + Yoko Ono as a Crime-Fighting Duo and Other Fictional Ideas
Annie Zaleski on Cher, Stevie Nicks and Pushing Past Writing Fears
Nelson George on His Next Book and Making Mixtapes in Paper Form
Michaelangelo Matos on Writing and Editing Music Books
