Radio 2310

I’ve been DJing now for over a decade.  The more I say that out loud the more astonishing it seems because I can remember when DJing and beat mixing was all that I wanted to do… and I was horrible at it.  I couldn’t mix two songs together if you spotted me the first 8 beats.   After a while I became so frustrated that I contemplated giving it up completely.  Sure I was competent with my tables but I wasn’t nearly as good as I wanted.  I had  a gig at AM 930 for a while but that paid squat, it was a news and sports station and most of my work was done on the board (including one heartbreaking night in 1997 when a certain closer failed to get the last two outs of a certain game 7) without ever cracking the mic.  I just wasn’t feeling it anymore.

I quit the radio station and started teaching classes on MS Office for a training company in Parma. One of my students and I were talking about music during a break when he informed me that he was a DJ at the 100th Bomb Group.  This guy was in his late 40s and seemed to know what he was talking about so it had sparked my interest once again.  With this new found energy I began practicing again, but this time with more focus and a sense of purpose – something I didn’t have previously.  The training company actually hired this student to be my new admissions director so we developed a pretty solid friendship, which only motivated me more.  I finally had a contact that I was certain over time would help me get where I wanted to be.

It took me almost a year but he finally offered to introduce me to his “boss” at the club because he was thinking about hanging it up.  I made an audition tape and after a couple of weeks I got the gig.  But now I had to learn a whole new way of mixing – CDJ’s (Pioneer’s professional CD players).  The problem however wasn’t the learning curve but was the total lack of one.  I had finally become so proficient at mixing vinyl that when I saw how simple it was with CD I felt like I was cheating.   Not to mention the music catalog that I now had access to was tremendous.  Long intros, breaks, outros, everything was labeled with BPMs.  It seems like something so simple in hindsight but at time a whole new world had opened up and I ran head first into it.  I was that 10-year-old boy again that used to take his tape recorder and his little record player and record himself pretending to be Casey Kasem.

Fast forward 8 years.  The Bomb Group closed in 2001 and reopened as a restaurant only and the dance clubs in this city are horrid for the most part.   I only play about 18 to 20 songs a night at the club I work, most of the time for the same people so of course they want to hear the same songs.  Some of the mixes I’ve done so many times I don’t even need my headphones to cue them up and I can hold a full conversation simultaneously. The only bright spot was that I did reconnect with my friend who works at the Rock Hall  and he was steadily feeding me new music.  Nonetheless, what I once perceived a shiny new toy was now just flat out boring.  Each New Year’s party would roll around and I would say “this is the year I quit doing this shit”.  It was a hassle.  Summer would come around and I’d want to travel and then in winter it was Cavs season.

Enter one evening trip home from Amish Country about this time last year. I had taken my normal Saturday night off from the club to go see the folks and I’m flipping through the stations on Sirius. For some reason I settle on Eminem’s channel Shade 45 – a station I rarely listen to.   They’re running a weekly show called The Press Play Show hosted by Mick Boogie, who’s been DJing here in Cleveland for about as long as I can remember.  He was the in-arena DJ for the Cavs for a couple of seasons as well.  His guest is Jazzy Jeff – yes THAT Jazzy Jeff – who to me might be one of the greatest to ever lay his fingers on a piece of wax.  Jeff is promoting a mixtape of mashups called “My Faves” that anyone can download for free from his website.  They play a couple and I’m completely blown away, not by how great the tracks are (because I’d expect that from Jeff and believe me some of them are outstanding) but by the fact that my friends and I (well, mostly my friends because I sucked) had been mixing that exact same style back when we first started.  So here I am listening to a Cleveland DJ, on national radio, talk to an idol of mine who is promoting something that I know I now have the ability to produce.

The proverbial fuse had been lit.

I immediately called my friend in Ithaca to tell him what I’d just heard.  As I’m no doubt rambling on about what I think all of this means he tells me that I have to join Facebook.  Up to this point I had taken a hands off approach to “social networking” sites because I thought it was dorky and I’m a big enough dork as it is.  But he’s telling me how great it is and how he’s been able to hook up with other DJs and artists, people he’d lost track of, and that you can restrict how much others can see (a big plus in my book).

This is where the old snowball starts picking up speed down hill.  Facebook is way better than I’d ever perceived it would be.  It’s not long before I’m off to Chicago to see one of my old college buddies on his hip hop tour of the Midwest.  I’m hosting cookouts at my house (and the 2nd Annual one will be this Memorial Day weekend again so mark your calendars now).  I find out that Mick Boogie still does a monthly Ol’ School show here at Touch Supper Club the last Saturday of every month and that he’s doing a project with the same guy I went to see in Chicago.

Pretty soon I find out about Twitter and jump on there (@djmark23 for anyone that wants to follow).  Again, way cooler than I thought it would be.  Quietly, the amount of stuff I find out about  on Twitter and some of the people I’ve admired and now been able to talk directly to is mind melting (if there’s any Jim Rome fans reading this, Greg in Vegas (@gregvegas) has one of the most hysterical Twitter pages out there). Now I’ve added Ustream and have the ability to broadcast my shows world wide over the Internet (something I’m still pissed I didn’t think of sooner) and for the first time in my career I can honestly say I actually have people that will show up to club based solely on the fact that I’m working.

And just like the day I figured I might have a shot at being a working DJ, I’m re-energized. This leads me to finally invest in Scratch Live – a program that lets me manipulate sound files on a laptop with either my turntables or my CDJ’s (again, I could shoot myself for not making the switch sooner) and just like before, I feel like I’m cheating.  I can do dozens of things with SL that I could never have accomplished with just two decks.  Before I couldn’t justify the cost just to use it for a couple of half-hour sets a week, but the scope is now so much bigger.  The monotony of playing for the same people over and over put me to sleep.  You ever wake up  suddenly from a nightmare?

The toy is shiny and new once again, as is the focus.  Over the next three years I think you’re going to see Cleveland make another national comeback.  Between the Cavs being perennial title contenders (as long as you-know-who doesn’t go you-know-where) and the new casino that’s going to be built downtown, there’s going to be quite a few eyes on our fair city for 6 to 7 months out of every year. What’s that mean for your friendly neighborhood DJ?  Who knows.  All I can do is keep bangin away and hope someone notices.

But I like MY chances.