Sorry, bit of a long read as I chopped it out of a blog post I wrote.
I became interested in DJing at a time when my “scene of interest” was pretty much dead as a doornail, at least on a local level. Unlike many of my predecessors, I became interested in DJing because of my prior interest in production as opposed to the other way around. When I became interested in the performance side of things, I started looking for places to play… and seemed to keep finding only remnants of a scene that once existed. I missed my opportunity.
Don’t get me wrong; it’s not like my town was ever a mecca for nightlife. But I had at least hoped to find something.
I tracked down the few events that I could find (MySpace was starting to become popular, and I used that in combination with some local message boards that were still hanging on). I started meeting and talking to people, learning a part of my city’s history that I had never been previously aware of. Once upon a time, the clubs were always packed and they didn’t all just play Top 40 radio music. There were illegal raves, and it wasn’t a struggle to get people out to them. There was apparently this inherent love for music and sense of community in the scene that I was not able to observe by the time I got to it.
Now, it’s probably fair to say that some of these stories were probably rosy retrospection. (Things are never like “the good old days”.) But the more old flyers, pictures, and stories I loaded into my brain, the more I realized that it wasn’t just that. There was a scene once, and it disappeared. This was due to a number of reasons, and you might get a different answer depending on who you ask. But suffice it to say, a recurring theme seemed to be that a few main “legs” of the support structure moved away or lost interest, lines got drawn in the sand, and the scene was left for dead. I wasn’t happy to have missed the boat, and I wanted to see if I could do anything about it. There was a reasonably decent hip-hop and Top 40 scene at the time, but nothing centered around what I was interested in… which, at the time, was trance and house music.
I started trying to find other like-minded individuals to see if there was some way to get something going, but I wasn’t exactly sure how to do it. Sure, MySpace was coming around, but the idea of social networking the way we think about it today was still a bit new and weird. In the meantime, I scraped together some (very ghetto) equipment and started playing house parties for my buddies to get used to the idea of mixing in front of people.
I had heard of a weekly electronic music event from a few years prior that was pretty successful at a small dive bar. I went there a few times and started talking to the bartender, who also happened to be in charge of events and general management of the place. As it turned out, she was a super nice person who was involved in all sorts of local art and music stuff. She noticed that I was just as interested in helping to stimulate the local music scene as she was, and decided to let me start playing some Tuesday nights along with a friend of mine who was around during the scene collapse. I gathered as many of my friends together as I could to support these nights, and usually managed to have 10 or 20 people there each time. It wasn’t much, but it was something… and we were having a good time.
From there, it led to more and more gigs and more involvement in the scene.
