Just how far and high can one DJ ride a set of turntables? With a little help from his friends, Matt Shafer rode his decks to another stratosphere.
Known on the airwaves as Uncle Kracker, Shafer is one shrewd, though unassuming, Detroit Rock City alum who sprouted in the shadow of his boyhood friend, Rob Ritchie, better known as Kid Rock. Ritchie would produce demos for the younger, chubbier Shafer, and one night when Rock’s DJ went AWOL, Kracker got the job.
After Kid Rock hit multi-platinum in 1999 with Devil Without a Cause, the wheels were greased for Kracker, who, aside from being Rock’s DJ, also co-wrote Devil and possessed plenty of songwriting chops of his own.
Kracker’s 2000 debut, Double Wide, recorded with Pro Tools in the back of the Kid Rock tour bus, built slowly at first, and on the power of the single, “Follow Me,” picked up by pop radio and MTV, eventually sold two million records and put Kracker on the pop-music map.
Not too shabby for a former strip-club DJ who many people thought was merely riding on a large set of custom-made coattails. Now, with his follow-up, No Stranger To Shame (Lava/Atlantic), Kracker stands in a unique position: With Cocky, Kid Rock’s latest album, “only” going platinum and therefore considered a disappointment, Kracker is poised to pounce, to develop with No Stranger To Shame a self-sustaining career beyond the margins of Kid Rock.
With punchy Memphis horns (“I Do”), a pinch of country twang (“To Think I Used To Love You”), rap-metal (“Keep It Comin’”) and Kracker’s hummable rasp (“In A Little While,” “I Don’t Know”), No Stranger To Shame might be the break out.
We spoke to Kracker and asked him how one goes from a strip club DJ to Kid Rock’s DJ to multi-platinum artist.

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After years of hard work and little acknowledgment for it, a good DJ can command about as much respect as any great musician. He or she can produce tracks, run a successful business, turn the world on to new music and work with some of the most talented names in the industry. All that, and he/she can still rock a party on any given Saturday if needed. One only needs to point to the example of Masters at Work for proof. Coming up as they did at a point in history where the DJ was just beginning to stake out the respect he has today, New York house impresarios “Little” Louie Vega and Kenny “Dope” Gonzalez helped lay many of the cornerstones on which the DJ empire now stands with their taste, sophistication and class.
As the star DJ of the group, Vega got started early as the youngest member of a very musical family. His father played saxophone, while his uncle Hector Lavoe helped bring salsa to the United States as part of the Fania All Stars. In the meantime, as hip hop lived through its early days in the outer boroughs, Vega soaked it all in, while his older sisters introduced him to house culture through Larry Levan’s legendary nights at the Paradise Garage. This began a long apprenticeship process, which brought Vega close to key players within and without the world of dance music, steadily gigging and building up his rep as a primo house jock all the while. Vega finally ran into quintessential bedroom producer Gonzalez in 1990, who originally recorded as Masters at Work with another partner. They discovered their talents complemented each other, and completed their first production with then-unknown salsa singer Marc Anthony in 1990.

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