DJ Adjacent

It has been a little while since I wrote my last post and given my evening yesterday, I felt like it was a good time to change that.  When I decided to make deejaying my official side business, I wanted to make sure that I was really good at it.  I think I mentioned in my last post that was about 19-ish when I bought a mixer, a CDJ-500 and used my home CD player and house speakers to DJ.  In hindsight, I had absolutely no clue about "beat matching," "the one," BPMs, different types of scratching, or any of the tools a DJ needs to actually be good at it.  ALL I had was an ear for music that was heavily informed by the hip hop, R&B, 80's pop music and old school Black music (e.g. the Isley Brothers, Ohio Players, Funkadelic/Parliament and Barry White).

So fast forward to the present, after about nine months of DJ lessons and vastly superior kit (sidebar: I think "kit" is a very UK expression of the word "gear," but I rather fond of it) and I am a much better DJ...technically.  After leaving my day job and picking up my wife and DJ bag from the house, I was on my way to perform at a boutique lingerie shop in Maple Lawn.  I am not sure what I was expecting when I got inside, but it was definitely smaller than I imagined.  My instructor and I were kind wedged between a rather short table and rather expensive brasiers.

The cause was awesome enough...It was raising money for breast cancer.  Aside from my instructor, it turns out that the only other person I knew at the store was my wife.  However, one of the many things about music that makes it so awesome is that it didn't matter.  What did seem to matter was my music choice.  I got a heads-up that this probably not a hip hop crowd from my instructor and he was probably right.  For me, last night was all about officially graduating from level two of my DJ program and moving into the final level before I graduate from the music school.  For the guests, it was all about having a nice backdrop for an event geared to address a really good cause and promote their business.

That reality made me glad that I spent several days crafting a completely house/deep house-focused playlist for my routine.  Compared to how active I think deejaying is when playing hip hop, house music is rather subdued.  Its structure lends itself to stacking songs on top of each other much like a kid might play with legos.  And if you are creative enough, the results of those combinations can be truly moving.  And although I wasn't in a dark, foggy club, it was still really fun hitting the transition points I planned in my software's internal mode live with a pair of turntables.

The set I prepared could have gone on much longer than it did.  My instructor told me that I would be playing for at least 30 minutes, but asked if I was comfortable playing an hour.  Being someone who hates being "caught out there," I made my playlist longer than it needed to be and only got through about two-thirds of my playlist when I swapped places with my instructor so he could finish out the night.  In any event, I am officially a level III deejay and the next time I perform in front of people (for the purposes of these lessons), it will be in a much larger venue for a longer period of time.  I'm looking forward to putting all of these skills, the ones I have learned up to this point and the ones I will hone over the next few weeks, to the test!

I remember the first album my parents bought for me.  I was a Michael Jackson fanatic and having Thriller was everything to me, at least until that "Pledge of Allegiance" spoof came out following MJ's Pepsi commercial accident.  Hey...what can I say, I was a kid and those times were less enlightened (or at least I was).  In hindsight, I guess it was never really mine because I didn't have a record player, my father did.  And when my parents divorced, I didn't ask for the record and he didn't offer to give it to me, but man...while I was playin' it, I played the hell out of it.  I really didn't understand the significance of most of the lyrics, but I sang them with all of the energy my childhood frame could muster while reading them from the album's liner.

Anyhoo, fast forward around 35 years later, give or take a couple of years, and I have a very modest collection of vinyl.  If you told me as recently as about five years ago that I'd be paying around $30 for a single record, I would have asked if you were high.  At that moment, most of my music collection resided on my computer and whatever wasn't on my computer could be found in the CDs I can't bring myself to part with.  As I have come to appreciate lossless music, keeping those shiny plastic discs makes me feel like a sage, but I'll save that for another post.

Anyway, my wife took me to a local fire station that arranges for food trucks to congregate on Wednesday and unlike most fire stations I have ever seen, it has an electronic billboard.  As I ordered what would turn out to be amazing street tacos, I noticed that the sign advertised a record sale every third Sunday of the month.  I was immediately intrigued and made a mental note to check that out later.  Later came yesterday morning.  Using my curiosity and recurring need to eat as an excuse, I made my way over to the Arbutus fire station to see what it was all about.

There were A LOT OF vehicles parked in their parking lot and I got a little skeptical when I saw people selling records out of their trunks.  I was cautiously optimistic that there was more to the event than that, so I made my way into the fire house.  To my amazement, there were tons of people milling around and investigating many tables full of as many crates of sundry vinyl as they could support.  Honestly, I was fairly overwhelmed because it was impossible to know where to begin and I didn't have infinite funds to devote to my search.  With relatively few exceptions, most of the records where used, which suited me just fine.  I could always go to Sound Garden if I wanted new vinyl, but my goal was to spend tens and not hundreds.

If I was a producer and had an amazing knowledge of older music, this would have been as close to heaven as one could get.  I mean, I suspect you probably could have found anything if you had all afternoon to look through all of the music.  However, I had a wife to bring food back for and a sweet, but rather needy dog to get back to.  In the first crate I looked in, the gentleman was selling his records three for $30 and I within about ten minutes, I found three albums worth taking home.  In no particular order, those records were Fleetwood Mac's self titled album, the Car Wash soundtrack (with Ray Steven's "Everything is Beautiful" randomly smuggled in) and Quincy Jones' "NDEDA."

I have to be honest, I don't know any of the much about the Ray Steven's or Quincy Jones' album, but the former was "free" and the latter...well, I've never heard anything Quincy Jones touched that I thought was wack.  Plus, the album cover art was fuckin' amazing.  For 1972, that perfectly coifed afro and daishiki were dripping' in pro-Blackness and afrocentricity.  The detail in that portrait alone made me feel like it should be framed, but best believe I will dust it off and play that puppy asap.  

Okay, so $30 down, I figured I would try to find some old break beats or something.  There was lots of R&B and jazz on display, but hip hop appeared to be fairly scarce.  After wandering around the great hall, I stumbled across this one dude selling various singles for $1 each (or six for $5).  I was rather amazed to see the R&B, House and Hip Hop singles on display and I knew that this would be my best opportunity to find hard-to-find instrumentals and a cappellas.   Man, was I ever right!!!  A few Christmases ago, my wife bought me a turntable I could use to rip songs to my computer and some of the records I saw really lit a fire in me to actually use it for that purpose instead of just casually listening to records, which is a joy in its own right.

I won't bore you with any more verbiage and instead will post images of the records I bought.  $40 very well spent!