Sean Quinn can’t dance. It’s ironic given that he’s the man in charge of what might be the best little DIY dance night in town, a weekly rave-up at ZuZu in Central Square devoted to classic soul, funk, and R&B called Soul-le-lu-jah. Not that I’m one to talk. Last Saturday night, Quinn and I found ourselves shoulder-to-shoulder wallflowers, awkwardly swaying and shimmying to the warm, scratchy sounds of Eli “Paperboy” Reed’s 45 collection. Reed, who’s known around town as a howling, guitar-slinging blues manchild, is part of Quinn’s ever-growing cadre of rotating DJs. But when I looked around the packed and sweaty room — at the guy to my right doing some sort of weird interpretation of the twist, at the girl to my left shaking her hands high above her head with abandon — I realized that this wasn’t the place to worry about looking cool, that I had to give in to the power of the music and let myself go. Soul-le-lu-jah has had that effect on a growing number of scenesters. On any given Saturday night you’ll find an eclectic crowd packing ZuZu not just to dance the night away but to receive what amounts to a rock-and-roll history lesson.
The 31-year-old Quinn’s enthusiasm for classic soul is infectious. He says he’s tried to build the night into a place where people like himself feel comfortable letting their guards down and, well, just getting down. “There’s no ego; it’s not about a scene; it’s not about what you’re wearing,” he tells me when I meet up with him and DJ PJ Gray, who’s been involved with the night since its inception, for brunch at Cambridge’s Miracle of Science. “Come down, have a beer, and just dance” — that’s the Soul-le-lu-jah sales pitch.
Carrie D’Amour (a/k/a Miss Firecracker of Lata Gata Negra League of Masked Lady Wrestlers) started Soul-le-lu-jah in May 2003. And she agrees. She points to the near-universal appeal of “good, raw, and honest soul music” as fostering an inclusive environment. “Everybody can find something to shake to [the Temptations’] ‘I Can’t Get Next to You,’ can’t they?” she says via e-mail.
D’Amour, who’s no longer involved with Soul-le-lu-jah, says she started the night not out of any great ambition to be a DJ but because “I got sick of having to travel to NYC every month just to be able to spend the night dancing to classic soul.” Originally spelled “Soul-A-Lujah,” after the song by the Stax supergroup of Johnnie Taylor, Eddie Floyd, William Bell, Carla Thomas, and Pervis, Mavis, and Cleotha Staples that appeared on the 1969 Boy Meets Girl compilation (one of D’Amour’s staple tracks), it started as a bi-weekly happening and ran as such for a little over a year.
“Bi-weekly nights are a bit tough to run because no one is ever quite sure which weeks the night is happening,” explains Nick Marcantonio, who along with Gray and Ty Jesso was one of D’Amour’s original go-to DJs. With the help of Carly Weaver, who was managing ZuZu at the time, the night went weekly in September 2004. “Going weekly was the best move we could’ve made,” Marcantonio continues. “Fans of the night no longer had to check the calendar to see if the night would be happening a certain Saturday. Word spread, and before long we were getting great crowds every Saturday.” He explains that one of the keys to Soul-le-lu-jah’s success is the rotating-DJ structure. “Soul is a pretty wide-reaching genre, and each DJ brings something different to the night.”
Quinn agrees: “You’re going to have people that had a good time the previous week; they’ll come down and it’ll be the same vibe but a completely new set of tunes, a completely different sort of style. There are so many different ways to approach the soul scene.”
After we finish up brunch, Quinn, Gray, and I hop in my car and head across the river to In Your Ear on Comm Ave, which they say is the shop for 45s. Although everyone seems to agree that the Internet is the best way to find good soul records these days, Quinn and Gray bring an almost scientific sensibility to disc digging. Usually they start with the “new arrival” and “rare” soul boxes. “I usually look at the rare bin because Reed [Lappin, owner of IYE] knows his stuff and he’s going to put the really good stuff up there,” explains Gray, pulling up his sleeve to show Lappin his new tattoo, the Stax Records logo. If they spot a 45 put out by a label they know and like, such as Stax, Hot Wax, or Atlantic, or if the label on the disc itself is primitive-looking, and thus likely the product of a small, independent company, they’ll pull the record and give it a quick spin on their portable turntables, which they bring every time they go shopping. “You can tell pretty quickly if it’s something that you’re going to want for yourself or if it’s something you’re going to play out,” says Quinn. “If you’re looking for stuff to play out, you’ll know almost immediately if it’s worth buying.” He mentions “high energy” as the primary quality he looks for in a song that he’d play at Soul-le-lu-jah.
