the clurb

I dj-ed this woman's 40th birthday party a couple weeks ago. I got the gig through kickball/wcbn friend Yalcin. It was his present to her from him. So this group of 40 somethings love to go to soul club, and when they learned that Northern Rob was all the way down south, they went to the next best dude, me the soul club liasion. Forest djed with me, and we used Raj's equipment, so he came with too. Gig went well, we got paid and got out. After we went over to this other guy's 50th birthday party and ate a bunch of smoked ham. At least I did. A drunk Lindell was spinning too.

Next gig I did was the Accapella-prom, the formal dance for all of the accapella groups on campus. A friend asked me if I wanted to do it (w/ pay) and I said sure. I asked Tyler to do the gig with me, because, well, he's my dude. Problem was, we seemed to be way over our heads. Accapella parties generally consist of a bunch of people in a dark room grinding each other to some top 40. But me and Tyler are always up for challenges. It was in the union, and no alcohol is allowed in there, so the fact that we weren't going to be spinning for a bunch of drunk kids was working against us as well. To start off, I played out my northen ("cheap as chips") soul, which no one felt (perhaps they were waiting for the raer). Unsurprisingly, the only thing anyone reacted to was stuff they had heard before (which was almost nothing between me and Tyler's crates). We got so many requests. I mean, among this crowd, I can see and deal with the Rihanna/Beyonce/Lil' Wayne requests. I expect that. For those, I would just tell the girls we don't have any, but we're playing some MJ up next and that would send them squealing back to the dance floor. But others, I didn't know what to say. The first request I got was for MJ's thriller, while I was playing his 'baby be mine'.

"Can you play thriller next?"

"No, man, I can't. See this song is on the album thriller, and I'd have to take the needle off the record and put it on thriller, and that just wouldn't look good"

"Oh, huh. I didn't know. I guess I'm a little old fashioned. I didn't know thriller was an album!"

".......um, it's the biggest selling record of all time. 100 million sold? no?"

*blankface*

Another dude comes up to me and Tyler when the dancefloor is relatively full and asks, "Do you guys have any jazz?" Me and Tyler just look at each other.

I tried to meet the guy halfway. "I mean, I have some donald byrd, but it's maybe not the jazz you're looking for."

"Do you guys have any Miles Davis or stuff from the 50s or 60s?"

"No. We did not bring our jazz raer with us."

The last girl to make a request went up to Tyler and asked if he had any ABBA. He said no. Then she asked if he could play anything from the 70s. He said that's mostly what he was playing. She called him out on it, and wanted to have some sort of argument. Then she wanted to see his binder of music, you know, like the ones wedding dj's have.

Overall, a pretty stressful gig, but we got paid, and people seemed pretty happy with our stuff. So call me and Tyler for a gig.