Back in 2007, I showed up at Northland for the first Soul Skate. A free soul food buffet was on offer. Around 3 AM, the rink cleared out for “roll call,” in which skaters showed off different regional styles—JB (James Brown-style skating) from Chicago, fast backwards from Philly/Jersey, Detroit’s slide-heavy “open house” variant—while onlookers lined the rails. The event felt convivial, wholesome, about as far from the hedonistic Movement afterparty scene as you could get.
A decade and change later, Soul Skate is on the map as a national skate jam. 2018’s edition was basically a small festival, with three rinks and a four-day programme that included things like an indoor picnic, a documentary screening and an adult prom.
“That was truly a mistake,” said Kenny Dixon Jr., AKA Moodymann, on Soul Skate’s escalation from local party to national festival. I spoke with him in the iconic, purple-curtained house he owns on Grand Boulevard, just across the street from Submerge, a noted local record store and headquarters for Underground Resistance. “Really it started out as, ‘How can I put everybody in one room and focus on them buying my T-shirts?'” he said. “I wanna put everybody in there and smother them with my record label, my artists, my T-shirts. That was one of the ideas for Soul Skate, and then that flopped and people didn’t give a fuck about my T-shirts or my product or my records. They were like, ‘When’s your next skate party?'” He laughed. “Yeah, it’s its own monster now.”
Since the mid-20th century, skating rinks have been an extraordinary staging ground for music and DJ culture, to say nothing of their importance within the civil rights movement and as a gathering space for black communities. As real estate in American cities becomes more scarce and rinks in black neighborhoods disappear, national skate jams like Soul Skate have become a crucial environment for a scene steeped in a tradition that continues to flourish.
Louie Vega, who fell in love with music and DJing as a teenage skater during New York City’s early ’80s skate boom, returned to the rink to DJ Soul Skate in 2014. “It’s beautiful that Moodymann and the Soul Skate team stick to the roots and show where it comes from,” he said over the phone. “Skating music has a lot to do with R&B and dance, just as much as discos and house clubs.”
Style skating—a skate-dancing style that has splintered into hundreds of regional variants—got its start, in a roundabout way, in Detroit. Bill Butler started skating in 1945 at the Arcadia Ballroom on Woodward Avenue in Detroit on the one night black people were allowed in. At the time, skating rinks were typically scored by chintzy organ music, but on black nights they played records like Count Basie’s “Night Train,” “Ella Fitzgerald’s “Do Nothin’ Till You Hear From Me” and Duke Ellington’s “C Jam Blues.” Years later, as an air force sergeant stationed in Alaska, Butler won money for a pair of skates in a game of craps and started developing his signature “jamma” style, his movements mirroring the solos on the jazz records he’d skate to. He was assigned to an air force station in Brooklyn in 1957 and showed up at the nearest rink, Empire Rollerdrome, where mostly black skaters were rolling to live organ music. He approached the woman in charge and asked if she would play “Night Train.” The needle dropped and style skating changed forever.
Legendary skate DJ and Soul Skate regular Big Bob Clayton refers to the now-closed Empire Rollerdrome as the “the birthplace of roller disco.” Clayton, a New York native, has been DJing for 50 years.
“Most of the dance skating today, you see them holding hands and doing their moves, that’s jam skating, that’s Bill. That’s Bill Butler all day,” Clayton said. “I used to go to Empire in ’69, but I wasn’t worried about DJing in the skate world, I went there because I liked the hustle. I’d go there and dance, I’d skate for the first two hours, then the next two hours, I would hustle in the middle. We were all skaters and dancers, so a friend came to me once in ’77 and say, ‘Yo Bob, you ever think about DJing in the skate world?” I said, ‘Nah man, I’m a club head, I like the club scene.'” He rattled off a list of legendary NYC haunts. “The Loft, Better Days, that’s where I liked to be at… I’ve been playing club music and house music ever since the ’70s. That’s what I came from.”
Clayton started DJing for skaters in ’77, eventually landing enviable rink residencies at The Roxy, then at the mecca itself, Empire, both of which were outfitted with soundsystems designed by Richard Long, the legendary audio architect who built the systems at Paradise Garage and Studio 54 in New York and Warehouse in Chicago, to name just a few. Clayton began immersing himself in regional music and skate styles. The folk music anthologist Harry Smith used to have a party trick where he’d identify the county a singer was born in from one verse of a song. Clayton is the skate world equivalent.
“Every state and city had their own style,” he said. Locking arms and traversing the rink in trains came from Detroit, for instance. “The hitch-kicking in the line came from Detroit. When you do a bow-legged move like this on your skates”—Clayton spreads his knees in his chair as though he’s on skates—”it’s called a grapevine. Came out of Detroit. If you want to see all the fast backwards stuff, that came out of South Jersey and Philly, and the Delaware area. I could talk to you about this for hours.”
Beginning in the mid-’80s, Clayton traveled to rinks around the US. “I heard about wherever the adults were skating in each city and I would just go. They knew me from Florida to Buffalo, but a lot of cities didn’t know who I was when I showed up. I would just pay my money, come in and stand around and I say, ‘Oh, they play this here, or they skate like this to that music.’ I took notes, I wrote stuff down. Bill gave me the incentive to do that. He traveled all over the country and brought this jamma technique. And that’s how I got into the game. So for almost two decades, there was nobody out there but me, because nobody else knew what to do.”
As Clayton made strides as a national skate DJ, he remained part of a coterie of NYC DJs and musicians that included Larry Levan, Nicky Siano and Boyd Jarvis. “Even though I was a skate DJ, they knew I loved club and house music, but I made my money in the skate world. Levan was the man. I’d leave Empire at four, five in the morning and go to the Garage. We learned from each other and I brought it to the skate world. When I first started taking out the bass and the highs, all the other DJs around the country at the rinks were like, ‘What the hell does he keep doing to the music?'”
Clayton played the adult prom at last year’s Soul Skate, holding court in front of a room of skaters who had switched out their wheels for heels and patent leather shoes. He attends every Soul Skate and regularly advises the team of 14 who run the event, which includes Rafael Bryant (Smooth Skatin Ralph), Demarco Bearden (Gadget) Joann Johnson (JoJo) Marcus Gavin (Fresh) and Maurice Dortch (Moe).
“Me and Kenny [Dixon Jr.], we met in the early ’90s,” Clayton said. “He was skating and hanging out then. This was before he had the record label… Kenny is a beautiful brother. He treats me like a god. He picked me up in a Suburban looking like I’m the president, being whisked through the city. They take good care of me and the respect is there.”
The Soul Skate hospitality isn’t only afforded to skate legends like Clayton. When I told Dixon Jr. I’d attended various Soul Skate events in 2018, he asked with genuine concern if I’d had a good time and apologized for how hot it had been. “It was way too many people last time,” he said. “Apologies for that.”
Speaking with Dixon Jr., who has agreed to only two interviews over the last decade, was never a sure thing. We were originally meant to meet up at Detroit Roller Wheels for a morning skate session he frequents, but he was due at DGTL Festival in Amsterdam the next day, and I was informed last-minute he wouldn’t be able to make it. Undeterred, I drove out to the rink, a colourful building on an otherwise drab stretch of Schoolcraft St., on a cloudy Friday morning. Inside, a DJ played slow R&B jams like “Get To Know Ya” by Maxwell and “Insanity” by Gregory Porter. Regulars greeted each other with hugs on the side of the rink. A regal older couple glided by with one leg up in perfectly synced figure-skating style.
Traci Washington, Dixon Jr.’s right-hand, turned up a little before noon. After greeting a few skaters, we settled into a booth at the snack bar. I asked her how she got into skating.
“My daughter is now 21, but when she was in middle school, probably 13, they’d have skating trips,” she said. “Often times during the day the rinks are reserved for school parties, so I went as a chaperone. I told Kenny about the party and he came over and once I saw what his body was doing on skates I was like, ‘What in the world is going on here? What is that?’ He was skating around children, jumping over kids that fell, simultaneously helping kids up, adeptly cutting through crowds of children. It just made me want to acquire that level—if not that level of skill—just to use my body as a form of art.”
She went on: “No matter how tired he is he’ll get off a flight from overseas and get to the rink that night. And he’ll find skating sessions. If he’s in London he’ll find a place to skate. So it’s a private way for him to enjoy himself. He is extremely humble, he doesn’t promote himself or Mahogani Music.” She gestured toward the rink. “These people in here don’t know anything about Moodymann. They’ll just say, ‘Hey Kenny, how you doin’?’ And he’s always happy to see them and they’re happy to see him.”
At the rink, the swagger of Moodymann’s persona slip away. It occurred to me that he’s not interested in interviews because he’s not interested in self-promotion. He’s concerned with giving back to the community, whether it’s throwing a BBQ in his backyard or handing out copies of his latest, unreleased LP. After I left Detroit Roller Wheels, I spoke to him on the phone. We talked about Soul Skate, Big Bob Clayton and that morning’s skate session. He told me to come over to his house in an hour. Knocking on the door of his house on Grand, purple curtains blowing in the wind, felt like finally meeting a mythical, Wizard of Oz-like character.
“That party is for Detroit,” Dixon Jr. said. “We take an L every time, it takes us two years to recoup, save up and get money. But we’re in the negative every year.”
Due to the wave of rink closures, Dixon Jr. explained, skating has become a road trip culture. “For example, a lot of us skaters travel. But there are a lot of skaters that hear about the out-of-town parties and they can’t travel. They don’t have the means or the funds. We decided, why don’t we just bring it to them? A lot of people ask me, how come you’re not DJing or the regular rink DJ is not there? It’s because, in a lot of ways, that’s the same stuff we hear on a weekly basis. The idea of this here is bringing out-of-town people to Soul Skate is so, one, they can enjoy all the out-of-towners they don’t usually get the opportunity to see, and two, so we can show them Detroit hospitality and make sure everyone’s having a good time.”
At each Soul Skate there’s an unannounced headliner at Northland on Saturday night. In 2016, Dixon Jr., dressed immaculately in a white suit and straw campaign hat, introduced hip-hop legend Rakim. In 2018, a curtain dropped, revealing soul music legend Ronald Isley to a screaming, adoring audience gathered on the wood floor of the rink.
I asked Dixon Jr. if the Detroit skaters know he’s a house music institution, jetting off to play festivals every weekend. “A few,” he said. “It leaks out because you got the internet now. But have I officially come out and agreed to any of that shit? No,” he laughed. “Going over there is providing a way for me to do things like this. To give people a concert they didn’t even know was coming to them. They might have not seen Rakim. Or, you know, believe it or not, you got people that skate and will skip out on dinner or provide for their children, and I got a full course meal, you know? Try to keep it all night. I got food. Don’t leave talkin’ about you’re hungry, I gotta go and I’m hungry. I got that for you. Don’t leave cause you gotta go to a club to see some other thing. I got a concert for you. You ain’t gotta go nowhere, it’s all tonight baby. Plenty of motherfuckers from all around on the floor.”
Back at Detroit Roller Wheels, Traci told me how the national skate community found out about Detroit and Soul Skate. “The largest party in the country was started by a woman from Detroit called Joi,” she said. “It’s this huge party called Sk8-A-Thon, held during labor day weekend in Atlanta. At these parties, sometimes they’d give the flyers back, they’d say, ‘Detroit? No, we’re not coming up there.’ Because we’re known to be aggressive. I mean, we have a very smooth style of skating, but you go to Royal Skateland, these people like to slide, they’re very protective of their territory and if you can’t skate that style, you might get injured. I would meet hundreds, I would dare say thousands of people who skate and eventually, they got interested in coming here and the word spread.”
She continued: “We’re one of the few parties that’s truly diverse. That’s because we’re serving house, techno, Moodymann fans and the black skate community throughout the country. Some of the parties around America, they’re so big, you can’t rent skates, you have to have your own, because they don’t want anyone to get injured. We make sure at Soul Skate you can rent skates, because a lot of the people who made this party possible are fans of Moodymann.”
Soul Skate is unique in that Dixon Jr., known for producing and DJing club music, is now a recognizable figure within the black skate community. They recognize his afro and sunglasses from Soul Skate T-shirts, not the cover of Silentintroduction. But skating culture is about music as much as it’s about style skating and community.
“A good skate DJ plays like your parents at home,'” Dixon Jr. said. “They play like back in the ’70s when you went to a club and they played everything. See, I can go to a club, get down, sweat, ‘Boy, that shit was exciting,’ me and my friends we would get down. We would have a great time, talk to the ladies… At the skate rink, they gonna slow it down, they gonna break it down, they gonna break it all the way down. You ain’t gonna hear no slow jams at the club no more. Back in the ’70s and ’80s they’d rock you for about two hours and they’ll break it back down.”
Dixon Jr.’s sprawling Prince collection was neatly displayed on the walls around us at his Grand Blvd. house. “You’re telling me you’re not gonna play no ‘Do Me Baby’ in this bitch? The fuck? Fuck that.”
The style of DJing Dixon Jr. is referring to has its roots in New York City’s post-disco scene, when the loose, slowed-down sound developing on singles from classic Big Apple labels like Prelude worked just as well, or better, at the rink as they did in the club. The development of skate music from the late ’70s up to the present is intertwined with the roots of dance music, as nuanced and colourful as any sub-genre.
Big Bob was a member of Judy Weinstein‘s record pool, trading records with the likes of Levan and Siano and bringing in Tee Scott as a resident DJ at Empire. Louie Vega laced up his skates as the late ’70s, early ’80s eight-wheel craze swept the black and Latino communities in his home borough, The Bronx.
“It was soul music, it was black music, it was R&B,” Vega said of the era’s prevailing skate sound. “It was Prelude, it was Salsoul, a lot of Patrick Adams. Boogie music, that’s definitely rollerskating music.” The Masters At Work cofounder’s first gig was at a roller rink. He absorbed countless sets from the likes of Clayton, who he called “the Larry Levan of roller skating,” and Danny Krivit.
Krivit got his first pair of skates in the late ’70s, as the introduction of rubber wheels made it possible to skate in the subways and on the then-abandoned West Side Highway. Already a successful club DJ with an unmatched pedigree in New York music, Krivit was hired to play for the Good Skates skate crew.
“When I played that gig, I’m seeing what’s actually working for skaters,” Krivit told me over tea in Brooklyn. “When I played in clubs, even though I was doing well, there were specific types of clubs I was good at. I was a funky DJ. I would play a lot of funky disco, R&B. DJing for skaters, right away I felt like, ‘Wow, this is right in the pocket for me. In fact it’s a little more my direction than a lot of clubs I’m playing.'”
Krivit would go on to audition and land a residency at a new kind of skate club. In 1978, as roller skating became the fad of the moment, Steve Greenberg decided to open a skate club that embraced the velvet rope ethos of Studio 54: The Roxy. It was a far cry from the Empire Rollerdrome.
“There was a whole group of real skaters who waited a long time to go The Roxy,” Krivit said. “There ended up being a kind of elite group at Roxy which was a generic and not-as-black crowd. There were token blacks, the manager was black. The music wasn’t very good. The groove was a little light.” Eventually, management changed. “Steve Hanael came in and was like, ‘We’re gonna ramp this up, it’s public. Fuck all this red rope shit. I’m gonna have daytime stuff here, we’re gonna really get going.'”
Still, Hanael’s music tastes leaned conservative. Frustrated with the music policy at The Roxy—the constant requests from management to play “Y.M.C.A.” or “Le Freak”—Krivit took over the sparsely attended Monday nights, embracing a new kind of skate groove.
“I was playing what I thought was really rollerskating music,” Krivit said, “and within a month it went from 30 people to 1000 people.” Slow, druggy records like Taana Gardner’s “Heartbeat” became hits at Krivit’s night at The Roxy, and later, his residency at Laces on Long Island. Alongside celebrities like Keith Richards, Jim Brown and Rick James (who adopted the skate groove when penning songs like “All Night Long” by the Mary Jane Girls), dance music legends like Larry Levan and The Loft sound engineer Alex Rosner would show up with skates.
Danny Krivit“Larry also came to Roxy a lot, and he in particular was really impressive on skates,” Krivit said. “I told him, ‘Wow, you’re really good!’ And he goes, ‘Yeah, I used to be a skate guard at Empire roller rink!’ He was talking to me at the edge of the booth, when I put on ‘Girl You Need A Change Of Mind’ by Eddie Kendricks, and he’s like, ‘No you didn’t!’ So he races to the floor on his skates. I’m not really paying that much attention, but then I don’t see him for a few weeks. And when I went to the Garage, I saw him with his arm in a sling and I’m like, ‘What happened?’ and he tells me, ‘You played that song and I ended up pulling my arm out on the rail because I wanted to get onto the floor so fast!’ You had roller skaters hearing Garage music at Roxy and going to the Garage, like Abbie Adams, who ran the skate shop at The Roxy.”
Adams spoke to me over Skype from her home near Washington D.C. After falling in love with roller skating, she told me, she opened a shop called Movin’ selling custom skates and clothing in East Orange, New Jersey. Eventually, she’d open up a pro shop at The Roxy, where, as she put it, “I went to college—the college of dance music, R&B, soulful music—listening to Danny Krivit and [The Roxy resident and famed skate DJ] Julio Estien. I learned so much from them on eight wheels… At about the same time I started going to the Paradise Garage, Red Zone, The Tunnel, so I knew about being in a club type situation with a crowded dance floor, but there was something about being on eight wheels and the freedom of the floor with this incredible music, and both Julio and Danny just had such an incredible ear. There was this very cool period of time, disco, post-disco, pre-house, and this R&B dance style music actually made for rollerskating, [Vaughn Mason’s] ‘Bounce Rock Skate Roll,’ and some of these songs. I can’t tell you how many times I ran up the stairs to the DJ booth, with skates on, and went, ‘Danny, what’s that?'”
Adams became deeply embedded in the New York and New Jersey dance music scenes. Her partner and boyfriend at the time, an aspiring DJ, set up decks in the shop, where kids would hang out playing Pac-Man and breakdancing. Eventually, they started stocking records.
“Every Monday my partner and I would go to New York City and we would dig through crates for hours,” Adams said. “We’d spend four or five hours going through, and mostly this was because he was building his record collection. I’d just start asking questions and I figured I could go to New York City and buy the records at Downtown or at Vinyl Mania or at Sounds and bring it back to my shop and charge 25 cents or 50 cents more and sell it. So we started with a little section of records and just started getting more and more, and as ’81, ’82, ’83 went on, my world with the DJs and the scene started getting bigger.”
Eventually Movin’ became to Tony Humphries and Zanzibar what Vinyl Mania was to Larry Levan and Paradise Garage: dancers and music heads would leave Zanzibar in the morning and head to the store to buy the records they’d heard Humphries play.
One night, Adams was smoking a cigarette on a fire escape outside The Roxy. “I hear the bass from this other spot and I ask somebody, What’s that?” Adams said. “And they say that’s Kamikaze. Timmy Regisford and Boyd Jarvis were playing there, so I took my skates off and I went around and I went into the club and I introduced myself to Timmy. I asked him if he could play Brenda And The Tabulations ‘Let’s Go All The Way,’ and he looked at me and was like, ‘Who is this girl?’ And Boyd was actually there next to him playing live, and I had never seen that… Boyd had so much stuff. Just reels and reels and reels of stuff. I thought, well, let’s put out a record together. That was the idea, put one record out, then one record led to another one.”
Movin’ would become a crucial label within the East Coast proto-house and house scene, with Adams releasing Boyd Jarvis’s “I’ve Got The Music” along with records by Blaze and another New Jersey producer who started coming into Movin’ when it was a skate shop: Kerri Chandler.
The impact of music played at skating rinks stretches far beyond underground dance music. “Rinks have played such a huge role in our music history,” said Dyana Winkler, the co-director of the brilliant 2019 HBO documentary on black skate scenes, United Skates. LL Cool J, The Fat Boys and De La Soul were regulars at Krivit’s residency at Laces on Long Island. “To me it seemed like there was an entire hip-hop scene around picking the skate grooves,” Krivit recalled.
Hip-hop in particular found an early, crucial venue at skating rinks, before traditional venue owners were willing to take a chance on the new genre and its crowds. N.W.A. and Salt-N-Pepa played their first shows at roller rinks. Jellybeans, a rink in Atlanta, was an ’80s hangout for the likes of TLC, Outkast and Jermaine Dupri. Dr. Luke of 2 Live Crew threw parties crucial to the development of the Miami bass sound at Miami rinks. A 17-year-old DJ Screw got his first gig at Almeda Skate Center on Houston’s South Side. DJ Spanish Fly, an architect of the gothic Memphis sound, DJ’d at Crystal Palace Skating Rink. The hook in the underground hit “Trigga Man” goes: “Hop in the Cadillac and roll by the skating rink.” (For more on developments in regional rap and dance music and the rink scene, check out A.J. Samuels’ exhaustively researched work for Electronic Beats, Sound In Motion.)
The rink remains a crucible for regional dance music subcultures. Footwork, the blazing-fast juke variant and dance style, was developed by the late DJ Rashad, DJ Spinn, RP Boo and others in the disco rooms at Markham Rink in Chicago, where skaters would get down rinkside in street shoes. Chicago is also the birthplace of what is perhaps the most vital modern roller skate music culture: JB.
“JB is a unique subculture in the midst of skating,” said Reggie Brown, skater, JB music producer, skate scene lynchpin and star of United Skates. “It’s not like anything that you’ve ever seen before. When people see rollerskating, they think circles… when you say JB, that means you say James Brown. Everything that James Brown was on the stage is everything that JB is in the rink. We produce our own music to skate to. We’re talking a skate style that goes all the way back to the Savoy Ballroom, all the way back to the Lindy Hop days. We’re talking a style that has origins that precede most other cities’ origins of roller skating period. For us it’s a generational thing that gets passed down, father to son, mother to daughter. If you skate JB, nine out of ten your mom probably skated JB or your grandma skated it. The showmanship of the style, the complexity of the style and the ability to really just free yourself creatively can all be funneled through that style… JB is a culture, it’s a lifestyle. It’s not like lacing up your skates and going to the rink, even though I’m talking to you on the phone, I’m still a JB and I don’t even have my skates on.”
When the horns come in on a JB track, JB skaters mimic the godfather of soul’s wildest moves, flipping into full splits (“nutcrackers”) out in the corners of the rink. Reggie Brown is responsible for one of the biggest current JB hits, “Whenever I’m Down,” but he works within a tradition originated by Chicago producers Keezo Kane, ShaProStyle and B-Dash. Keezo in particular makes bombastic skate tracks that have resonated outside of the rink. He was signed to Kanye West’s GOOD Music, and Dixon Jr. regularly plays his skate anthem, “Ga Ga Ga.” Brown also shouts out DJs such as Chicago’s Joe Bowen and DJ Mz Tone, Brooklyn’s DJ Arson and Atlanta’s Brian Taylor as integral skate DJs, along with Baltimore Club legend KW Griff, who has experienced a creative renaissance as a skate DJ and producer.
Reggie Premier Brown“Around 2001 is when I started paying attention to music more in the 80, 90 BPM range, which is what skaters in the DMV—District of Columbia, Maryland and Virginia—consider their speed for ‘snap’ skating,” Griff told Electronic Beats. “What I heard at the rink wasn’t familiar to the average radio listener, and I had some of these albums. Eventually that led me to become more involved with skating again and, over time, to make roller skating tracks of my own.
“[There were] a lot of fascinating remixes you really wouldn’t hear anywhere else but the rink.” Griff continued. “Back in the day, the classic B-side cuts could only be heard at the rink because at that time only the DJs had them. You would go to the rink because you’d be excited to hear these songs specifically. They weren’t on the radio and they weren’t blasting at parties because it’s not really party-type music like, say, Stephanie Mills’ ‘Starlight.'”
In addition to club crushers like “Bring In The Katz (feat. Pork Chop)” and the just-licensed “Be Ya Girl,” Griff has been putting out devastating, slo-mo tracks for Baltimore’s signature snap-skating style.
Reggie refers to JB production (and related styles like KW Griff’s snap skating remixes) as “brand new old school,” homing in on the generational tradition of style skating and skate music. “A lot of the records that they skated to in the ’70s and ’80s, we remixed them. ‘Children Of The Night’ by CJ is an edit of an original by The Stylistics called ‘Children Of The Night.’ If you played that record in the rink right now, oh, we’re gonna skate to it, because it’s a classic, but if you played CJ’s version, right behind it, it’s the new classic. Everything has a generational connection.”
Musical knowledge passed down over the generations, of flipping soul and funk B-sides into a “brand new old school” style, is an idea central to Dixon Jr.’s own celebrated catalogue. He’s crafted house classics by flipping records by Marvin Gaye, Chic, Bob James, Walter Murphy and Randy Crawford, to name a few. His approach to music and skating is based on oral tradition, knowledge casually imparted over the generations by a Detroit milieu including his relatives, skate rink DJs, record store employees, musicians, pastors and nightclub impresarios. Soul Skate is at once an incredibly complex and simple event, combining the mythos of Moodymann and Kenny, the guy who shows up for Friday morning skate sessions and gives back to his community whenever possible.
“Moodymann has nothing to do with Soul Skate,” Washington told me, referring to Dixon Jr’s alter-ego rather than the man himself. “He makes it possible, but he’s not here.”
Diviniti, the gifted Detroit vocalist who has sung on records by Piranhahead, Louie Vega and Omar-S, grew up skating at Northland. “The duality of that, it’s a very interesting dynamic watching him operate,” she said of Kenny the skater and Moodymann the artist. “The party on Saturday is when you really see those two worlds come together. It’s amazing to see all those people from all over the world there to skate, along with these experienced skaters who are traveling worldwide skating. It’s an interesting thing to watch him float between both of those. But in his mind, he’s just Kenny. He’s not Moodymann, he’s not the skater or the producer or whatever, he’s just Kenny. I think he just always skated and he finally just pulled it into the house thing. But even if he didn’t, we would be skating on Monday nights up at Northland Roller Rink, just hanging out.”
Soul Skate sits at the crossroads of skating and music, of past and present. The day after Ronald Isley performed, Detroit neo-soul artist Ideeyah took to the stage at adult prom. Out on the rink, old-time Detroiters who skated alongside Bill Butler in the ’50s brushed up against 20-something JB skaters from Chicago. Dixon Jr., Washington and the rest of the 14-strong Soul Skate team threaded through the crowd, representing Detroit amidst a sea of skaters and music fans.
Last year, the line outside Northland stretched hundreds of feet into the parking lot behind the rink. “Kenny was walking around like the pied piper,” Washington said. “I looked up and he had two or three hundred people behind him, because he thought they had been in line too long. He was like, ‘Oh no no no no, we can’t have this. I have to make sure they get in. They already have tickets.'”
In the windows of Moodymann’s house on Grand hang massive posters of George Clinton, Nina Simone and other icons of black music. Over the course of our interview, Dixon Jr. and I discussed the Purple One, Peter Frampton and local skate legends like The Baby Jim. At one point he paused. “You sure got me talking a lot right now. You know I gotta get the fuck outta here, right?”
While Soul Skate serves as a showcase of national skate styles, it’s always clear where Dixon Jr. is from. I asked him how he’d describe the Detroit skate style to an outsider.
“Detroit. That’s exactly how I would describe it, there’s no other way to describe it. It’s its own entity. You could look at any blaxploitation movie and you can feel that energy and that Detroit style of skating. It’s just how we skate. You know, look good. Everybody’s from Detroit that night. I don’t give a fuck where you landed from two days ago, that evening, you might have landed a couple hours ago, everybody’s from Detroit.”