PRODUCER MARK RONSON ON THE MAKING OF “REHAB”

The creative process works in mysterious ways. Take the moment of conception of Amy Winehouse’s smash “Rehab,” a song as crucial to the soundtrack of 2007 as Gnarls Brakley’s “Crazy” was to 2006, and one of six tracks on her breakout Back to Black album produced by England-born, New York-based Mark Ronson.

One evening, after shooting some pool, Winehouse was relating her romantic travails to Ronson as they walked back to his AllIDo Studios in Lower Manhattan. She explained that she’d started drinking heavily after a breakup, causing her friends and family to urge her to get some help. “They tried to make me go to rehab, and I was like, ‘No, no, no,’” she told Ronson. “When she said it, she did this ‘talk to the hand’ thing,” he remembers. “I said, ‘That’s really hooky—maybe you should go back and write a song.’ We didn’t give it that much thought. Then she came back to the studio and played me what she’d come up with, and I went, ‘Cool. Let’s put claps here and maybe a minor chord in the verse to make it a bit jangly.’ And that was it.”

After Winehouse left for the night, Ronson worked up the arrangement, and she sang over it the next day. Sitting in his studio, the producer plays me a snippet of the demo. His drums (played on a standard kit, not programmed), bass, guitar and keyboards emphatically lay down the now-familiar groove, and Winehouse’s vocal hits the hook with a vengeance. “Wow—it’s all there,” I marvel. “It’s close,” he agrees. “It’s just not as good.”

Even then, Winehouse and Ronson had themselves a natural-born smash; the rest of the process simply involved making it undeniable. To do so, he called on the Dap-Kings, a bunch of young rhythm and horn players from Brooklyn with an uncanny ability to recreate the sound and feel of vintage R&B records. Once these cats sank their teeth into “Rehab,” the song hit the force-of-nature level.

“When I started working with the Dap-Kings horn section on Amy’s record, I realized I could make the same kinds of sounds I used to sample when I was DJing back in the ’90s,” Ronson says in an accent that’s English-posh lightly dusted with Noo Yawk. “And when we recorded the whole band, the way Homer [“Funky Foot” Steiweiss], the drummer, played, it sounded like a record I would’ve paid 50 bucks in the store to sample one four-bar drum loop, only here’s a guy playing it live and putting these incredible fills in it, and I just couldn’t believe how good it sounded.”

Ronson discovered that the drums on the records the Dap-Kings had made on their Daptone label were tracked with just one mic, so he followed suit, using one-inch, 16-track tape. And that’s all it took to get that uncannily accurate Motown snare sound—one mic, magnetic tape and tons of reverb, old-school to the max.

“I wouldn’t have known how to make a record like that a year ago,” he admits. “I would’ve felt the same way I felt when Brian [Burton, aka Danger Mouse] played me the Gorillaz record—I’d just go, ‘Fuck, man, how do you do that?’”

Ronson has a lot in common with Danger Mouse. They both started out as turntablists, they move seamlessly between hip-hop and rock, they’re obsessed with vintage film music and their processes are collaborative. Also like the Gnarls Barkley and Gorillaz producer, the 31-year-old up-and-comer is getting heavily rushed by A&R reps, but thus far he has politely declined their requests. “All the people I worked with in the last year are friends,” he explains, “and it would be hard for me to work with anybody who isn’t. The thought of going in the studio and having these forced play dates—something about it scares and repulses me.”

This dude has every reason to be full of himself. Not only is he being universally acclaimed for his work with Winehouse, he’s also the most in-demand DJ in New York, the go-to party manipulator of celebs from Jay-Z to Tom Cruise (yup, he DJ’d that big wedding in Italy), and “the face” of DKNY, as they say. With all that, Ronson turns out to be totally about music—making it, playing it, listening to it, collecting it. As the prep-school educated child of socialites, he’s light years from the guy next door, but he’s totally genuine, and his enthusiasm is contagious.

That enthusiasm is in every note of Ronson’s wildly unorthodox album Version—an equally heady and visceral fusion of retro and futuristic beats and bleats featuring a battalion of shit-hot players including members of the Dap-Kings and Afrobeat/funk collective Antibalas, ?uestlove from the Roots and Ronson himself, joining singers like Winehouse, Lily Allen, Robbie Williams and Aussie newcomer Daniel Merriweather (whose album Ronson is now producing) on radically reimagined songs by the Smiths, the Zutons, Radiohead, Coldplay, the Kaiser Chiefs and Ryan Adams. The record truly has no precedent, but it seems to have been designed for the biggest and wildest Saturday night party of all time.

Version and Back to Black mark the maturation of a cutting-edge sensibility forged in the New York clubs during the early to mid-’90s. “When I started DJ’ing,” Ronson recalls, “I got really into music that bridged the gap between classical, jazz and big band—stuff like the Modern Jazz Orcherstra and Quincy Jones. I just always loved those sounds, partly because nobody else was doing it. There will always be bands trying to sound like Led Zeppelin or the Who, and R&B singers trying to sound like Stevie Wonder, but for some reason people are afraid to try and recreate the bombast and the lush backdrops of some of these old records, which is just as great and inspiring.”

When I note that his career path appears to be on a collision course with a gig scoring a James Bond film, Ronson’s eyes light up like the halogen high-beams on 007’s Aston Martin. “I’m lobbying for that so hard,” he says, “you don’t even know.”