DJ

Lost Video.

I had forgotten I had made this video on Friday night. It was wicked hot in the DJ booth.

[MEDIA=62]

Dance Already.

As the weekend looms on the horizon, I feel it’s fitting to get your toe tapping.

This single is from 1996 and still does quite well on the dance floor if there’s enough alcohol flowing. Only a few rarely believe who is singing when they ask.

Technology.


Flickr Link.

I’m a geek through and through. I love technology. When used properly, technology allows us to do some pretty amazing things.

While I miss the old days of vinyl records and turntables, tomorrow night I will be DJing in Upstate New York and camping in Pennsylvania at the same time. I couldn’t do that without the technology we have today.

Radio Remix.

A while back I mentioned that I really liked the Bimbo Jones remix of “10.000 Nights of Thunder” by Alphabeat. I see they have cut it down to a radio version and taped edited a new video to go with it.

I’ve also added a new link to The Wonky Pop Tour, which Alphabeat is a part of. I’m LOVING their music. See the new button on the right.

The Furry iPod Thing.

So last night was one of my regular DJ SuperCub nights at the solo, local gay bar. As I write that previous sentence, the use of “solo” and “gay bar” together like that brings up an interesting image in my mind, but I digress. Anyway, last night it was just a regular night at the bar; no special theme nights, no dance contests highlighting music older than the average age of the customers, no video accompaniment necessary. Since I had some Vicodin in my system, I was feeling a little loopy and looking back at the playlist, it’s a little obvious. After all, how many mixes of Donna Summer’s “Stamp Your Feet” can a DJ play in three hours? Apparently four.

You see, I’ve got this thing about taking requests. I don’t like to. I think my aversion to requests hearkens back to my radio days when young rugrats would figure out how to let their fingers do the walking and they would call and request the Beavis and Butthead duet with Cher while the song was playing on the radio, whilst doing their best to imitate said lead singers (not referring to Cher, there). I know that the DJ is there to entertain the crowd and set the tempo for a good time but speaking as a professional audiologist, you can rest assured that I’m going to play some really good music that’s going to, at the very least, give you something to tap your foot to. If I’m doing really well you can bust a move on the dance floor to your favorite track and seal the deal of not getting laid when you do it alone and your moves involve thumbs swinging in a myriad of directions with googly eyes on your face and your mouth agape.

How I love drunk lesbians.1

So last night I was in the middle of mixing excellent song A to excellent song B (which, by the way, doesn’t involve just pressing ‘PLAY’) when this rather large woman came bursting into my rather small DJ booth and immediately started yammering about a song she wanted to hear. Then she committed a mortal sin; she ignored my “one moment please” finger.

You must hold when you’re told to “please hold”. Strike One.

After I slid from the second Donna Summer mix of “Stamp Your Feet” to Leona Lewis’ “Bleeding Love” I turned to her, herded her out of the DJ booth and back down among the commoners and said, “now what did you want to hear?”

“What are you playing? What is this song?”, she asked as if I had asked her to lick a dead minnow. I think she had just dissed LaDonna. Strike Two.

“It’s Leona Lewis’ ‘Bleeding Love'”, I replied. Sidenote: it’s a really good remix that hasn’t killed the sound of the original track while keeping it very danceable.

“You need to play Mariah Carey’s ‘Touch My Body’ right now. I want to hear it tonight and I need to leave.”

Strike Three.

Now if she had some sort of whimsy in her voice I would have considered what she was saying to me. But there wasn’t a bit of whimsy to be found. She had a demanding tone in her voice. She sounded huffy. Plus, she had dissed LaDonna. Now, let’s stop the story for a moment and consider what is happening.

1. I’m a little loopy on Vicodin. My mood is swinging from giddy to growly with a prescription assist.
2. The tempo is currently moving along around the center of a gay man’s midnight tempo. It’s not racing with said man’s heart yet (from drugs or the latest bit of hotness that he has spotted, your choice) but he’s moving quickly and starting to get sweaty.
2. My leather wrist band is on my left wrist.
3. She did not have a drink in her hand nor had I seen her anywhere near the bar the entire night.
4. She wanted to hear the song so she could leave the bar afterward.

Perhaps I’m just a cranky ol’ club DJ but part of the gig is making sure people are staying at the bar and consuming drinks. No people+no drink(*a few nights)=no gig. Asking me to go from twinky time music to bump and grind music immediately so you can leave the bar is not going to get your song played. Ever. It’s also going to deflate the tempo of the aforementioned typical gay man that is sweaty. So I responded reasonably well.

I slammed the door shut in her face.

She didn’t come back for Round 2. Instead, she sent one of her friends up. With a LIST. That’s when the door remained closed for the next hour or so.

The dance floor was populated. People at the bar were bopping their heads. The vibe of the crowd was good. As her minion banged on the door wanting access I slid from a Pussycat Dolls remix to my personal favorite track, “10.000 Nights of Thunder” by Alphabeat.

It’s good to have the power.

I am a DJ. I am not a furry iPod.

1This twitter entry from last night should give you an idea of what else was occurring in the bar.

Stamp Your Feet.

It’s a two gig weekend for me. The day between gigs is always interesting as I’m in total night owl mode, but I’m surprisingly keeping busy around the house with a few home improvement projects. Lag bolts, beams and a few other devices make for an interesting experience for all.

I’m such a geek.

I’ve had this song in my library for a couple of weeks and have been “force feeding” it to the Friday night crowd at the bar. Last night they finally gave in and admitted that yes, it is a good song and yes, I know what I’m doing. It packed the floor with more than just the LaDonna fans.

Here’s the latest single from Donna Summer, it’s called “Stamp Your Feet”.  By the way, it was written in part by Danielle Brisbois, who played Stephanie on “All In The Family” all those years ago.

Quite frankly I fucking love this track.

 

More Than 12 Inches.

I mentioned a couple of days ago that I had been inspired by a recent DJ gig and have been busy this week selecting, downloading and tweaking new music for upcoming gigs.  Busy = over 175 songs this week.

Tonight’s crowd won’t know what hit them!

As I’ve been perusing charts and the sites and blogs of other DJs, I’ve noticed that each of them do as I do and occasionally post mixes on their site for all to enjoy. Many of them use a theme, such as DJ 50 Pound Note and his “Kiss The Future” series.

I’ve decided to name my mixes in a similar manner: “More Than 12 Inches”.

I think the name is quite catchy.

More Than 12 Inches, Volume 1 is now available.

 

The Common Ground.

The Common Ground.


Earl and I are back from our little adventure to Ithaca, where I was the guest DJ at The Common Ground last night. We had a really good time. The dance floor was busy from 11 p.m. onwards (that always makes me happy) and I had quite a few folks compliment me on my mix of music. It was different enough from the house DJs to keep in interesting but familiar enough that the folks were still able to know what they were hearing and enjoy accordingly. I had the opportunity to meet one of the house DJs, Dr. DJ Mike, who asked about the particular version of “Apologize” by OneRepublic and Timbaland that I play (it’s the Tony Arzadon Club Remix that I heard when we were in Dublin last fall). There were a couple of other inquiries throughout the night. The Common Ground also has a computer system with every song they have in their massive CD library, and one computer on the network is available to the crowd to make requests. I didn’t use their CDs but I was able to accommodate several of the requests throughout the night that scored me points.

The crowd was an interesting and somewhat amusing blend of folks. The club is larger than what we have here in Utica. It was Leather/Levi and Bear night (I spin best at these kinds of nights) and at one end of the club most of those guys were congregated around the bar chatting, playing pool and enjoying the music. At the other end of the bar were the club bunnies, twinks and a smattering of transgendered folks that I couldn’t tell which way they were transgendering. On the other hand, perhaps they were just creatively dressed. They celebrated my end of night selection of pseudo-disco tracks (“Coming Out Of Hiding” by Pamala Stanley, “The Rumour” by Olivia Newton-John) by clogging with their high heels.

The DJ booth at The Common Ground blew me away. They have a REALLY nice setup. The DJ booth was nicer than the last radio station studio I worked at! I hadn’t expected as much high-tech equipment as they had, nor did I anticipate the amount of volume that was available at my fingertips. I was in eargasm heaven. It was also a good opportunity for me to hear how my MP3s and such from various sources compared to each other. I have a couple of tracks on the PowerBook that I have to weed out simply because they don’t sound good over a relatively powerful system. Luckily they are mostly old tracks that I dug up from somewhere on the internet years ago and can easily replace by rerecording the vinyl here in the studio at home. Earl assured me that everything sounded fine with these couple of tracks but that I was probably noticing things that others wouldn’t pay a moment’s notice to.

This morning we slept in a bit and then came home by way of the Finger Lakes, stopping for lunch and a little shopping excursion at The City (formerly known as ‘Circuit City’?). I picked up a couple of new speakers for the studio here at the house as I was obviously inspired by last night’s setup. I expect to be making more mixes to share very soon.