Music Monday - Music as Income Part II - LIVE!

This week's Music Monday is courtesy of my niece Heidi, who mentioned something in comments that I didn't bring up...

I can't believe I neglected to mention it in the last Music Monday post, but in addition to Mon-Fri at AEI, and Friday Nights at C-89, I spent the 3rd and 4th Saturday nights each month DJing church youth dances! And also, during the Summers of '97 and '98, The Friday Night PartyZone was broadcasting live from nightclubs in Seattle... The summer of '97, in particular, was an extremely busy time. I worked 6:00 am to 2:30 pm at AEI Music, and on Fridays, around 6:30 pm I would pack up my car with music and head up to Seattle for my night at Club F/X, where I'd DJ my heart out from 8 to 2:00 am. Then I'd drive home, sleep, and on Saturday between 5 and 6, load up again with music and equipment to head up to either Bellevue or Redmond for a stake dance. Thankfully, they got over at 11, so I got to go to bed at a semi-human hour those nights.

You'd think that schedule would wear you down, and I'm sure that physically it probably did, but the music and crowd interaction was so completely euphoric that it generated all the energy I needed to keep going and going and going.

I DJ'd my first dance when I was 14. I was so excited to finally be old enough to go to the church dances, but I got there and was faced with epic disappointment. Lame music, no atmosphere whatsoever, and nobody was dancing. I went a few times, then lost interest... But knew that I could make it better someday!

Around the same time, an older friend called and said he'd gotten the opportunity to DJ a young adult dance, and could I help him out. He didn't have to ask me twice! Not only was it my first shot at actually DJing a dance, it was the annual Seattle Aquarium dance, and we were setting up in the underwater dome. Goodbye disappointment, hello EPIC COOLNESS!! It went off as well as I'd hoped, and I had been bit by the DJ bug. From that somewhat thrown-together event, I gradually gained experience through a wedding reception here, another young adult dance there, but never lost sight of my goal to DJ the youth dances.

My first taste of doing a youth dance was in the spring of 1985. I'd moved to Bellevue by then, but was still in touch with the same friend who originally got the Aquarium dance. He called me up and asked if I'd like to do a Video dance for the Seattle stake youth. WOAH! VIDEO DANCE?? AWE YEAH!!! One of the guys in the stake owned a video store - and this is back when video stores carried VCRs and TVs too. He loaned me a Hi-Fi VCR a couple weeks before the dance, so I could record all the top videos from MTV. Then the night of the dance came, and we had three or four big screen (like 48") projection TVs set up around the room, and played something like one video for every three or four non-video songs. It was a huge hit, and at the end of the night the guy who owned all the equipment asked me if I'd consider Video DJing weekly teen dances on Vashon Island. WOW!! A regular, paying DJ job! He perma-loaned me the Hi-Fi VCR, and every day after school I would record videos, keeping a log of what was recorded on every tape. The goal for these dances was to be ALL video, so I needed a complete current library.

I was so completely nervous the first afternoon when I went to catch the ferry to Vashon! I checked and re-checked the trunk of my car a half-dozen times to make sure I didn't forget anything, because Vashon was (and probably still is) quite isolated on its own... I wasn't confident that I could make up for forgetting anything. Setup took around two hours - and that was WITH my friend Scott helping out! We'd never hooked up so many TVs before! The venue was a large reception hall, and we had TVs in every corner, plus one on each side of my table. Finally, 8:00 came, and kids started showing up. These kids were starved for FUN entertainment that was ON the island. They were one of the most enthusiastic crowds I've ever played for! The dances went on all summer long, with takedown being a frantic race against the ferry schedule. One time, I took a little too long, and pulled into the dock right as the last boat home was sailing off. Even though it was summer, it was a VERY cold night there on the terminal... I'm sure my parents were at least a little concerned when I called and said I would be spending the night on the dock, but there wasn't anything either of us could do, so I just hunkered down in my little Mazda 808 and wished I could sleep. I was never quite so happy to hear the loud horn of an early morning ferry before!

After that summer, the video club never returned... and things slowed down while I finished school. I did manage to DJ one dance at my own high school (Go Interlake!) and also one at Bellevue High, where I spent two hours each day in the radio broadcasting class.

After graduation, I finally made the right contacts to get a trial shot at the Bellevue stake youth dances. I thought things went exceptionally well, and obviously they did too, because they contracted me to keep doing them! That first night in December of 1987, maybe 50-75 kids showed up. About four months later, that had more than doubled. By the early '90s, these dances were legendary, with kids driving from as far away as Olympia each month. I had started calling it Club Bellevue, and promoted the dances to the kids as THE place to be on the 3rd Saturday of the month. There was a group of girls who always danced right up front by the stage, and I nicknamed them the Club Bellevue Solid Gold Dancers. After a few months of giving them shoutouts, they all showed up wearing matching T-Shirts that said "CLUB BELLEVUE SOLID GOLD DANCERS". Those dances were insanely fun times for the kids, for the chaperons, and for me. There was enough longevity that I'd seen the same kids go from 14, awkward and shy, to 18 and bound for college. The rapport was something that I know I'll never encounter again, and is one of my treasured memories.

At the height of the Club Bellevue years, neighboring Redmond stake called and asked me to DJ their dances on the 4th Saturday. I agreed, and was shocked the first time, to see only about 30 kids. But those 30 kids had fun, and the next month I told Club Bellevue to come to Redmond next week, and the Redmond kids who had been there all brought friends, and within a few months Redmond was nearly up to Bellevue levels of awesome.

For a couple years, my posse and I rocked the dances of Bellevue and Redmond, and gave countless kids an incredibly fun, safe environment to be crazy in.

Then there was a change in the stake youth leadership in both stakes.

Almost overnight, I was getting phone calls nitpicking about this, that and the other thing. I kept smoothing things out, believing that in time the leadership would relax and let the good times roll.

But no.

Both stakes decided that things were bad enough that they got together and hired a "church dance expert" from Ricks college - now BYU Idaho - to teach me how to properly put on a dance. This guy was pushing 70, had an unnatural fascination with line dancing, and badmouthed every single aspect of DJing that I had used to make these dances so phenomenal. This was an all day session, with the normal Bellevue stake dance at the end of the night. Hundreds of unsuspecting kids showed up expecting Club Bellevue, and instead got "Line Dancing with Mr. Geriatric". They were running up to me asking why I wasn't up there, and what was going on... It was like those recent Burger King ads where they told people that the Whopper had been discontinued!

Finally, I was told that I had to sign a new contract stating that I would follow all 27 of his "pointers" or I wouldn't be welcomed back. I didn't even consider it, I quit on the spot. Never heard from Bellevue again about it, but Redmond still felt the need to call me THE DAY OF THEIR NEXT DANCE and tell me that they wouldn't be requiring my services that night. I told them that was good, because in case they had forgotten, I quit and wasn't going to be there anyway. Bleah!

So that was the end of my church dance career. Bellevue provided around ten years of good times and good money (I was making $350 per night by the end of it, possibly why they wanted to get rid of me) and Redmond was two or three years. But the memories are priceless, and will last a lifetime.

Other than a few wedding receptions each year, and the Whittier Elementary Harvest Hop (aka Halloween Dance) I haven't done much live DJing in the 21st century. The last actual recurring gig I had was as the opening week DJ at The Loft, a then-brand new club in downtown Tacoma. They had wanted me to be their full time resident DJ, and the club was supposed to open in August of 2000. But delays pushed it back a few weeks at a time, with the actual grand opening happening the week between Christmas and New Years. By that time, my interest had faded (see last week's column for an understanding on how I could get burned out on music) and I ended up only doing the first week. There were some good times there, but it was clear to me that the thrill was gone...

Of course, now that I make my living doing boring computer stuff all day long, the prospect of getting paid for music services sounds pretty good again... Anyone wanna hire a DJ?