Mark Ronson may have got his first break as a DJ and then gone on to become a hugely successful producer, but this wasn’t how he initially wanted his musical career to turn out.
Speaking to the How To Fail with Elizabeth Day podcast, Ronson revealed that, when he was young, his dream was to become a guitar hero.
“I played guitar. I listened to Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix and Living Colour and all these kinds of shreddy bands and then Guns N’ Roses and I wanted to be like that,” he explains. “And I was in this band with another guitar player, who actually technically was ridiculously gifted and could play all those crazy solos, and I was the rhythm guitar player.”
Ronson came to realise that lead guitar playing might not be his calling. “I was coming to terms with the fact that I just didn’t have those chops,” he admits.
Further confirmation of this came from a familiar face: “My best friend, Sean Lennon, we were always about the same level as musicians and he came back from a summer, he’d been studying [guitar], and he was just so far beyond me I just remember thinking, ‘that’s what being a guitarist sounds like. I need to just find a new thing.’”
Fortunately for Ronson, this disappointment coincided with his music tastes starting to change.
“It just happened at the same time I was really falling in love with hip-hop music and I didn’t know anything about rapping or making beats - I was DJing. [I thought] ‘This is this one thing in this artform, in this music I love so much that I could maybe do.’ So it made me switch to DJing.
“But yeah, I had this ridiculous fantasy of being like Slash with the top hat, no shirt, on stage shredding a Les Paul, but that wasn’t supposed to be me.”
Despite this ‘failure’ as he sees it, Ronson’s time learning guitar - and also bass and piano - certainly wasn’t wasted, as even though he never truly mastered any of these instruments, the skills he did have helped him out when he eventually started his production career.
“I never had a virtuosic talent that pointed the way - ‘this is what you go do’,” he says now. “I had to find it and it took me much longer, but by the time I found it I had these little tools in my box because of all these other things I’d tried.”
Ronson appeared on the podcast as part of the promotional jaunt for his book, Night People: How To Be a DJ in 1990s New York, in which he also reveals a strange encounter that he and Sean Lennon had with Michael Jackson in the late ‘80s.
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