Yesterday I was asked to DJ on the set of a reality TV show in which they team up two strangers and give them 36 hours to "make something happen". In this case, they had to raise money to secure a new studio and equipment for a local artist centre for street youth. The team set up an open-air art studio in the courtyard of a church, and invited people to come in off the street and make some art that would later be auctioned off to help raise money for the centre.
I love spinning records in public, and when one of the team members asked if I would volunteer my time to supply some music for the event, I was happy to oblige. I do a lot of gigs for art studios and other community events, and what makes these shows interesting is that you never know what to expect; it's always a different mix of people with different musical tastes, and I try to bring music that will appeal to a wide range of folks.
This time, I knew there would be kids doing graffiti on big boards, but there were also older ladies making paintings and young women drawing with oil pastels. I brought some vintage hip-hop, some soul, top 40 stuff and eclectic alternative disks from the 80's & 90's. I set up at 3 pm, though the studio had already been running since the morning. The graffiti kids, whom I was hoping to introduce to some "grass roots", fun-loving, un-gangsta oldschool hip-hop, actually left after two songs -- not, I assured myself, because of the music, but just because they had already been there for the better part of the day and wanted to do some skateboarding.
The day was also stinking hot -- somewhere around the 35-degree mark. By four o'clock the camera and production crew started to outnumber the artists. Nobody wanted to be outside for long in that weather, but we were stuck. There was, at least, a breeze -- It was actually a fairly strong wind which threatened to overturn the tents set up over the artist's work stations. Several times, the wind actaully blew the needles of my record players out of the groove and across the records, making an unexpected and uncontrollable edit of the song. Despite these hardships, I did my best to throw down some def mixes, and I think some of my experiments went quite well. I had a cassette of the old radio show "The Shadow" that I played in between and during the breaks of some of the songs, and it added a cinematic touch to the sets.
Likely because of the heat, and the fact that the open-air studio wasn't going as well as was hoped for, the production crew was a little testy. I kept having to cut off the sound in the middle of songs so they could film segments. They didn't want the tunes going on in the background because they would have had to clear the copyright for the music to include it in the show. So, what was supposed to be a rockin' good-time outdoor art party with live DJ, actually turned into a sweaty, strained, camera shoot, with yours truly standing around for the better part of an hour, looking pretty behind the turntables with no actual sound coming out.
Once the filming was done, and all but one of the artists had left, I did play a couple hours of music, largely uninterrupted, with my audience consisting mainly of the film crew, who asked me to turn the tunes down so they could talk and take it easy. When it became clear that no more artists were going to show, they shut me down altogether. I don't know if I wasn't spinning stuff they liked to listen to, or if they were just tired from a day's labouring in excessive heat, and wanted some peace and quiet. I think if I had anticipated my audience mainly being a film crew, I would have packed a few different records; a little more rock, maybe the Anthrax, Sabbath and Metallica that I've been looking for an excuse to spin.
As I mentioned, the gig was in the courtyard of a church. At five o'clock, the bells started to chime, right in the middle of Beck's "Never Forget You" from the Guero album. It made such a perfect mix, with the chimes falling in sync to the beat a couple of times -- I couldn't have planned that if I'd tried!
