Episode 05: Understanding the true value of things with Brian Rauschenbach

Welcome everyone to Once A DJ.

I’m here today with B boy, dj, promoter, chemist, marketer, entrepreneur.

There’s not much this guy’s not done.

It’s a pleasure to welcome Mr. Brian Rauschenbach, aka DJ Nostalgia B.

Brian, how are you doing today?

Pretty good, man, thanks.

Excellent.

Thanks a lot for coming on here.

And I’d love to just get straight into it really, to find out basically your backstory and where it all began for you, where you found music and DJing.

Yeah, well, I was a military brat.

My father was in the army, so I grew up sort of living abroad a couple different times.

Was in Germany collectively for about eight years.

And so I think that was around the formative years where I tapped into music and it was in the early 80s.

So what age would you have been then?

Probably around 12.

What sort of music was it?

What.

What was it that.

That inspired you?

Well, I think, you know, back then we were just going to like teen, teen parties and so the music was still very end of disco era ish.

And hip hop hadn’t really arrived in Germany in like 82.

What sort of disco were you getting in Germany?

Was it more of the, like synth, this kind of similar stuff like Moroder and things like that and the Hi-NRG?

Yeah, no, it wasn’t, it wasn’t as eclectic as that.

It was more stuff that was playing basically in a discotheques that were mainstream, so discos that might have been feeding military personnel.

And so it was like, you know, Lips and Funkytown and it was just more mainstream hits that we were listening to.

So what is the setup for being in the army and living abroad?

Well, you’ve got basically very limited exposure everywhere you can imagine.

So when we’re watching tv, we’re watching Silver Spoons from three months ago.

When we’re listening to music, it’s only what’s in the PX or the Post Exchange.

So that’s our one area where we’re able to transact and buy music.

Unless you went downtown and were, you know, getting exposed to maybe some German, German electro or, you know, some, some early stuff.

But that, that wasn’t the case until hip hop came and, and people were bringing tapes over from the States and exposing us to that music.

And it was.

A lot of it was just, you know, one song or two songs recorded on a cassette tape over and over and over again so that you could play it in your boombox.

And so it was.

We weren’t listening to, you know, full albums or LPs.

It was like Literally like, oh, this is Bambaataa, Planet Rock.

And it’s recorded 10 times on this side of the tape.

And the other side of the tape is Nucleus, Jam On It and it’s recorded 10 times and you just listen to the same, same two songs until someone brought another cassette tape over from, from overseas.

So what was the experience like of hearing that sort of electro stuff for the first time?

Particularly if you’re going from things like Funkytown and quite sort of safe disco to something that’s really edgy and real sort of counterculture?

I mean, it literally felt like that.

It felt like, oh, this music isn’t for everyone.

And you know, I was in the community centers or the teen center is what they called it overseas, and we, you know, I remember a kid, he probably was coming from the east coast and he was breakdancing and we all just were like, what the hell is this?

And how do we learn how to do this?

And.

And of course we went to the teen center every single day after school.

So your exposure level went really high versus someone that might have just been practicing in their, in their living room at home or something.

So we had like a collective of like 30 people trying to figure out how to do a backspin.

It’s.

This is like in one of the other conversations I’ve had where people have, they, They’ve just got to like unpick something that’s really.

You just get like a little flash of it.

And from that you’ve got to try and unpick this entire movement in this entire art form, be it breaking, be it DJing, whatever it is.

So what was it like?

So did you have like a sort of a crew, effectively?

Yeah, we had a crew without a name.

You know, we.

I remember someone came over with some, some fat laces and we were like, what in the hell are those?

And where did you get those?

And so of course then we went, you know, pumas were maybe $8 at the time or if even that.

And so then everyone went down downtown to go get some pumas.

And we didn’t have access to the fat laces.

You had to get those in New York or somewhere.

And so we were just double lacing our shoes, anything to make it kind of look like the other guy’s thing.

And then, you know, we had, we had crews, but we, we just danced together.

We didn’t really battle at the time.

Yeah, yeah, it was more showcase.

So like we eventually went down and I would say maybe my first job ever in life was.

Was B boying in front of the train station in Würzburg, Germany, you know, circa 82, 83.

But we were, you know, we had cardboard because we had seen cardboard.

We didn’t have linoleum, nothing fancy.

But we were just in front of the train station trying to get some money so that we could pay for more batteries for our boombox and maybe a cassette tape, you know, by the end of the week or whatever.

Yeah.

So you’re just really driven by the love for it then.

Yeah, yeah.

So once you heard hip hop, were you just like 100% hip hop, this is it, or were you still listening out for, for other types of music?

I mean, again, that hip hop was like not really defined as hip hop.

And so it was, it was literally like electro to me.

And I just leaned in really hard to that.

And I think that that’s also sort of what made me a little bit of a different hip hop head.

You know, in the, in the mid-90s, I had discovered drum and bass and it had that same energy again where I felt like it was different.

It was not, you know, mainstream Beastie Boys, Run-DMC era type stuff.

And I just leaned into it.

So I, like, I listened to a lot of Kraftwerk, Art of Noise in the early days and you know, one of my, one of my favorite songs is like Boogie Down Bronx.

Like anything that had that, that, that electro feel to it was just really, really high in my interest.

Did that change all when sampling came in then and people sampling more sort of funk rather than just drum machines?

Yeah, I think it, for me it was mostly exposure to radio.

Right.

And so like, so that I then came back to the states in 85, 86 and then I was exposed to everything.

You know, I saw the Ronald Reagan inauguration with the New York City breakers of Rock Steady Crew and you know, like, and then I’m listening to radio stations and back then it wasn’t pre driven formatting.

You know, you could, you could tune into three different stations and listen to freestyle, listen to college radio, hip hop stations.

And it was like live mixes and everything.

So it was, everything was there then.

It was like, then I got to choose what lane I really liked.

And you know, I was, I was on the west coast, so that also formed a lot of my music interest.

Where on the west coast were you then?

I was in Monterey, California, but living, living in, living on the base there.

Fort Ord at the time, before it got closed down and then in Marina and going to a school called Seaside High School and then later Monterey High.

School so what’s the nearest sort of big city where it was about 30.

Minutes south of Santa Cruz, an hour and some change south of San Francisco, so.

So north, Northern California, yeah.

So when did you start DJing?

Why?

We listened to again, you know, a lot of radio influence.

And so there was college radio stations that we were able to sit in and play CDs at the time.

And.

And there was also a couple other radio stations that they were playing our records.

That was KZSC and KSPB, Pebble Beach Radio.

And it’s like basically a high school radio station.

And they’d have a Sunday soul show and a couple hip hop shows, and we would turn up there and play records and CDs.

So I started collecting a lot of wax.

Probably 88 era in there.

So what was, what sort of stuff then were you getting then?

Was it all west coast stuff that you were getting?

You know, I think, you know, the, the original pieces that probably entered in the collection was a lot of Beastie Boys, Eric B. & Rakim, EPMD, you know, Rodney-O & Joe Cooley.

If for a little bit of west coast, you know, we were trying to buy Too Short records and stuff like that.

But that wasn’t getting radio play.

That was more, you know, just filling the bin up with.

With those things.

A lot of freestyle.

So it’s like Latin Explosion on the, on the East Coast.

But freestyle was huge in our area.

What.

Why is freestyle.

Freestyle is like Trinere, Connie.

You know, it’s like the electro meets Latin, right?

Yeah, it was huge on the west coast.

Probably New Jersey, New York, Florida probably got a little bit of touch on it too.

So whether.

Did there tend to be these little.

I say little.

I don’t mean to be defamatory or anything when I say that these kind of sub movements of hip hop that were regional because there was like in D.C. there was go-go, wasn’t there?

I guess in Miami you had the Miami bass and things like that.

So it was.

It kind of like that, like a regional offshoot.

Regional offshoot.

But like go-go, I didn’t get exposed to go-go probably for 20 years after it even I.

It even was a music movement.

So the regional part there did definitely block us off.

I don’t, I don’t even recall ever having a friend that listened to go-go, even with people moving around.

But freestyle was, you know, we, we leaned into like Miami bass, even though I had never been to Florida, you know, at the time, because it was so similar to freestyle, the, the sound.

And so there’s a lot of freestyle artists that are New York native artists that would come out and tour on the west coast.

And we knew all of that music, top down all the artists and everything because they were touring and they were doing the car shows, the car show circuit.

And I was a dancer in a dance crew back then and so we would open for these concerts,.

So we touring much with the dance.

Were you more dancing than DJing then at the start?

Yeah, I was definitely dancing a lot more in 90 to 93 in that, that time period because I was.

We were, we were in a crew called the International Stage Kings and we were going to all the clubs in the Bay Area battling all the dance crews.

And so then I got to see Cameron Paul in the early days at City Nights, you know, mixing on a reel to reel.

Like just a lot of the early, early club DJs from the Bay Area and we would just go up and down Northern California coastline to every single club just to battle other dance crews.

What was battling like back then?

Because I’ve DJed a few battles in probably about 10 years ago now and, and there’s this very like standoffish thing that I’ve seen where I think aggression plays probably more of a part of it than I would have expected.

It’s a lot of kind of like puffed out chests and gesturing at each other with quite gestures that kind of.

I’ve been at battles where everyone’s kind of done the same gesture and then it kind of loses its impact a little bit.

Yeah.

Was it that type of thing?

No.

Just think like in the early 90s there, I mean, music changed so much.

Right.

That like breaking was.

Went back underground, I would say.

It didn’t disappear, just sort of lived in its own little sort of layer.

But the club scene was very much about what we would call open format now.

Right.

It was like freestyle dancing.

And you just went with like I had, I had a buddy Manny that I went clubbing with every single weekend for years and we had routines.

So it wasn’t the battling that is like we’re forming a circle, killing the, killing the dance floor and, and everyone’s standing around us.

We literally would look at the dance floor, find two other guys or two girls that were dancing really good and then just get up in their space and then just, just start hitting routines on them.

And then they had, they had their routines and it was just just to get a little bit of crowd appreciation from the sidelines.

And it wasn’t a formal battle, but we would be like oh, yeah, we went up there and wrecked those two guys right there.

We, you know, that’s the third time we battled.

And it was literally, it could start and finish in three minutes on the dance floor.

That sounds good.

That sounds really raw.

Yeah, yeah, it was, it.

It was.

You know, we looked, we knew who the dancers were and we knew what clubs they were going to, so we actually went looking for him just for the challenge.

Was it strange coming into that after being on the air base in Germany where everyone’s just doing it together?

Was it strange going from that then to coming into a culture where you’re like, oh, we’re actually battling here.

There’s a bit, bit of something at stake, a bit of reputation.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, the.

The army base is definitely more communal, community oriented, like all the time.

And, and you know, a lot of that stuff still happened when I moved to California, was, you know, back close to an army base, so still have that same energy.

But I think they’re just crews formed.

You know, there was a lot of dance crews, and we’re all friends too, like, with a lot of these regional ones.

It was the ones that were outside of our area that we wanted to go see what they were doing and, and you know, what kind of flavor they had up in the Bay Area, because it felt like there was a lot of stuff happening there.

Was it much of a different style in the Bay Area.

At the time?

It wasn’t so distinct as it is now.

It was definitely.

They had a lot more access to fashion up there.

You know, Oakland was right there.

I mean, anytime we could get over to Eastmont Mall in Oakland, you know, we, we, we did that or, or just, just down in San Francisco itself.

And so, yeah, I think they just had a better fashion footprint, probably informed a little bit of their, their dance and flavor.

But I feel like we were right up there with them.

Yeah.

Because the reason I asked that, just for any listeners that curious, is that I think the Bay Area through times had quite distinct musical styles as well, hasn’t it?

Yeah, yeah, definitely.

Like, it’s had that hyphy and, And I guess was some of the electro stuff a bit unique in the Bay Area?

No, it was.

I think that’s where the, the whole north Northern California, because it was, you know, such a mix of cultures up there is like, you know, Bay Area had a lot of Filipinos and we.

And.

And San Jose and Monterey a lot, a lot of Hispanics.

And so like, everyone just sort of meshed together.

And I think car culture probably Had a big play in everything that was going on on the coast because it’s fair weather, so there’s car shows all the time instead of.

I live up in Seattle now and we have to wait till summer to pull out our cars.

And so, yeah, and cruising was a huge thing.

You know, as much as we went to clubs, we went cruising every Saturday and Sunday night, you know, in Salinas and Monterey.

And so that was a very, very big cultural thing to do, is to just get in your car, listen to music and cruise.

So was that all hip hop then that you were listening to on cruises,.

Or was that more varied hip hop and freestyle again?

Yeah, yeah.

So coming from the dancing and so he said it was early 90s that you were doing a lot of the dancing.

Did that, did that kind of fall away because you got into DJing or, or was there a different catalyst?

Yeah, I went away to school and then realized that I had a master, a massive record collection and started doing parties.

And I had CDs, cassette tapes, and vinyl.

And I was DJing with all three of those mediums depending on the, the, the college bar or house party that I was playing.

So, like, you know, if I played a, a frat party or someone’s house party, I’d bring my turntables, but I’d also bring my cassette tape or a CD player or portable CD player just because I didn’t have four hours of music and you know, all the variety that they, they would have wanted in the Midwest.

So, yeah, it’s, it’s kind of the same as taking your.

Taking your records now, but also taking Serato.

So you’ve got digital.

Yeah, yeah, but it was probably just a lot heavier.

Yeah, I mean, you know, I had Case Logics for, for days that, you know, I was able to flip through and, and the same way you mark records now or have always marked records that, you know, I had like, if it was like a Tribe Called Quest CD, I’d say, you know, song 226 9.

And I had them all marked on all my, all my CDs.

So it’s a, actually a interesting thing to look back at now because I had like a CD DJ collection.

Yeah.

You remember when the singles came out on CD and it was like, oh, now I got four versions of Baby Got Back.

So, you know, it, it like it filled up my cases with just like a bunch of singles so that you could flip through them real, real fast.

So.

Yeah.

Did you go to college locally then?

No, I went in Ohio in Youngstown, Ohio.

How was that complete cultural shift?

I was like, you know, kid coming from the west coast into the Midwest and the music, everything, like, you know, I’m riding low rider bikes to my college and there does not even a thing, you know, and so, you know, I’m driving.

Even, just even driving a Volkswagen in the Midwest is kind of an odd thing.

So, yeah, it was a, it was a big culture clash for me personally.

Did you kind of stand out then, would you say?

Yeah, I mean, you know, it was probably like five Asian people in my entire college.

And so, yeah, it was definitely something that I had to ease into.

But then I took that as sort of an opportunity of like, hey, I about to expose you guys to all this music.

And you know, I helped start the black student organization on campus just so that I could dj.

And I had them start dominoes tournaments just so I could dj.

I was doing anything I could in the park or house parties or just anywhere where I could tap in and just to be playing music.

So that’s awesome.

So what were the frat parties like?

I’m a little bit basic, basically based on what I’ve seen on telly.

I’m really curious about DJing frat parties and you know, they always look absolutely mental on films.

Yeah, I did the black frat parties.

So a little bit different than what you would see on TV.

And they all wanted to hear Trans Europe Express 10 times.

Really?

In the 90s?

Yeah, it was a huge, and it probably still is today, a huge stepping song.

And so that one song would basically set off the party every single time.

Right.

And then that just gave me the energy, you know, then it’s just there to James Brown too.

And you didn’t, you didn’t have to play, you know, at the time.

That would have been like, you know, Naughty by Nature, O.P.P. type stuff to have party jams.

You literally could have stayed in this like Real Eclectic lane just because the dancing was so different.

It was step dancing, right?

I’ve not heard of step dancing.

Yeah, I mean, you go check out some, some videos later on YouTube.

It’s like, it’s pretty amazing.

That song.

Literally, I, I had to go and find the Trans Europe Express for, for, you know, a period of time.

I was playing Bambaataa, but they didn’t want Bambaataa.

They wanted the Kraftwerk version because it had a slower tempo.

Yeah, it’s got that.

And there was full routines just on that intro to just get everyone in the mindset.

And that’s how those house parties were.

So they were like black fraternity house parties that, you know, I’m carrying in home speakers, not full pa, plugging into their speakers in, in different rooms and you know, it was a lot of fun, man.

So you kind of bootstrapped your own career then, didn’t you?

Yeah, yeah.

I mean I went from that to realizing that like I could own a PA too and rent out a pa and so then I just started going in to you know, wooden nickel classifieds and anything, just looking for old disco DJs stuff.

And then of course then I came on record collections and everything else.

And so I was just a. Compiling speakers when I was in college so that, you know, when I, if anyone wanted to have a gig, I just had this, I had the whole sound system.

Where did you start it all?

I mean, you know, rent out there is $110 a month.

Big three bedroom apartment, you know, we had, we had storage for days.

Yeah, everything’s big out there.

Everyone’s got a yard and a lot of space.

What was it like getting collections when you were out in the Midwest?

We still able to get good collections.

Did you get any that would like unbelievably good for the money or anything like that?

Oh yeah, man.

I came across a bunch of soul, soul and funk collections.

I got two massive disco collections from DJs that were probably at one point in time.

I don’t think they were ever club DJs.

I think they were all radio DJs but just pristine records, full catalogs, top down.

And then when I was buying hip hop, I was just buying it through Fat Beats.

And then if I bought anything import, I always got the stuff over in the UK and, and you know, just waited a couple weeks for it to get across the pond.

Yeah, I don’t know how many more of these stories I can hear about people getting amazing collections for very little because I’ve never, never had that sort of look.

I’ve, I’ve had a few good things but never like landed a full collection that’s got loads and loads of really good stuff in it.

So you come to the end of college then and what’s the next step for you?

Is it moving?

Is that when you moved to Seattle?

Yeah, then I, I got a U haul and loaded it up and went to Seattle.

And while I was in Ohio, Tomb too.

I had also amassed a large collection of thrift stuff.

Like I, I probably had about 200 sweatsuits, vintage sweatsuits, 400 pairs of, you know, redline jeans.

I, I just Had I was buying everything that I thought the Japanese were, would be interested in.

And so when I came to Seattle, I didn’t work for like almost two years.

I just sold vintage clothes and, and couch surfed at my sister’s house.

So, so was, so were you selling vintage, was it we selling online at that time?

No, no.

I mean eBay probably was around 90, 94, 94, 95.

But I was selling to resellers in Seattle, some of them that were direct to Japan and then some that were just, you know, just in my neighborhood.

And so I, I’d come in, I’d look at their store, see what they had and anything.

It’s almost like a record store.

You see what’s on the shelf above the stuff that’s in the bins.

And I would see and I’m like, oh, they collect Lucite purses.

Well, I’ve got 30 of those purses.

Oh, these guys have vintage radios.

I’m going to go and see if they want any of my radios.

And I just had just tons of stuff that I had amassed over about a four year period in Ohio at thrift stores that I paid peanuts for.

So when you were buying the stuff at the thrift stores, were you, were you buying it thinking I can sell this on at some point at a profit or were you just buying it because it was cool stuff?

Cool stuff.

And then, you know, I had come out to Seattle to visit my sister and saw what was being sold at the thrift stores and said there’s so much of that in the Midwest.

And so then I went back and just picked all the spots.

And it was pre Internet, so everything was there and everything was cheap and available.

And you know, I could go into.

A,.

A Jewish church sale that I knew happened annually and buy every single jacket on the rack for a buck a jacket.

So do you, do you think that that kind of skill, intuition, whatever you want to call it, do you think any of that comes from when you were moving around?

You’d go somewhere new and you’d have to kind of assess the culture of, of this new place and, and you’d have an eye on our people around here are into this thing or into this thing?

You know, if you think about how you went to the Midwest and you were able to dial into the right things to get yourself to where you.

Wanted to be, I mean, you know, I never really thought of it, but that is very Very interesting because I was always trying to figure out where I get this, like, thing of, like, collecting.

I always wanted to have something to barter with or to get, you know, accepted into that, into that culture, that.

That thing.

And so I, like, I did, you know, reflecting back now, I. I did identify stuff and then try to figure out how do I get involved in that and how can I come with my own.

My own piece to.

To add to that.

So, yeah, I mean, I only brought the collecting thing up because it’s been sort of in my DNA of, like, my records and cataloging and.

And.

And figuring out what might be hitting before it hits.

And I’ve done that through a whole bunch of different other means.

So.

Yeah, and the collecting has led to the.

To the dj.

The collecting’s led to a lot of different things.

Yeah, yeah.

It’s open different doors and.

And giving you different paths to go down.

So when you moved to Seattle, then were you.

Were you straight away, like, right, I need to get DJing or we focus more on the selling?

No, the selling was just make sure that I wasn’t, you know, just sitting around doing nothing and adding to sort of, you know, living with my sister.

But yeah, no, I went straight, straight into DJing.

At the time, I was very focused on, you know, 94.

So the 96 hip hop hadn’t really happened yet.

So I was really focused on drum and bass.

So when you say 96 hip hop, what sort of things are you referring to?

I just feel like the independent era,.

Like, backpack, like Rawkus and things like that.

Yeah, yeah.

So, like, I mean, the Rawkus stuff was.

Is kind of a little bit still highbrow, independent to me, Like, I was into that stuff, but I hadn’t leaned in fully until it was like, you know, Company Flow, Socrates, you know, J-Live, where it was just.

I felt like every album wasn’t a record label that I wasn’t familiar with.

And so.

And, you know, you could buy white labels and all this stuff, and then it.

It had this attraction to me.

The same way that drum and bass has had where there’s like, VIP mixes or like, you know, dub plates.

Like, hip hop has never had a dub plate other than a white label or a promo.

What’s the VIP mix?

A VIP mix is like, you, You.

There’s a song that’s.

That’s out, it’s on, it’s.

It’s being played by a lot of the DJs, but then the producer of that track will only give the VIP mix to maybe eight select people.

And so if you think about that, if you’re one of those eight people and then you’re playing, you’re playing in a, in a club in London on the weekend, they’re, they have familiarity with the tune that’s, that’s coming in or that’s starting to play, but you have one of eight copies of distinct mix.

And to me, I always thought that that’s what keeps you relevant as a DJ is being able to have access and curate songs and things that no one else has.

So I mean, in my early days of record buying, anytime I saw Audio Two, I bought the copies whether I had five at home or not because I didn’t want someone else to have access to that, that, that song.

And so I like, in my head I was like blocking DJs of like, you know, I don’t want, you know, I play this and that song cracks every time I play it.

And if I see it in any bin in any used record store, I grab it because I just didn’t want them to have it.

And it was built from this like, thing of like, you know, like, why are you coming to see me other than, you know, maybe my musicality is good, but I also have access to music that you don’t.

And then I think when all that got democratized with MP3s and everything, then I also lost a lot of interest.

Yeah.

Were you, were you covering the labels as well on records?

Everything.

I was doing all that crazy stuff.

Yeah.

And I loved.

I mean, I’ve got a bunch of records that I’ve completely smashed up with a black pilot Markers because, you know, I didn’t want anyone like Trainspotting my tunes.

And so I just would just mark, mark out the thing till you couldn’t even decipher what record it was.

But I knew what it was from the colors that were bleeding through my marker.

I love this, like, this furious competitiveness that people have.

I think it’s so fun.

Yeah.

And then, you know, it’s like in, in, you know, in old drum and bass days, like if you think about what was coming over here, we would get four copies of a big tune that was, you know, getting played across, across England.

And it came out on the Tuesday.

And so you had to develop a relationship with the buyer at the store or they were very diplomatic and didn’t do that.

And they would just put them in the crate at 2:30 in the afternoon or 3 the next week or 4 the next week.

And you just had to have been in exotic imports downtown Seattle.

When the record hit the thing, the bin and, and it was like, you know, there was 10 drum and bass DJs in the city and only four copies of that tune.

And so yeah, it just, it created competitiveness just by the way the music was distributed.

So how did you start getting your network for DJing in Seattle?

I did, I think what I, I hope even to this day a lot of up and coming DJs should and should be doing some of them I see sort of walking in, in these lanes but going to figure out where you like music and the crowd and the people and then actually investing the time to, to, to meet those people even if you’re not in their crew or in their circle of friends.

And, and I, I leaned in, I, I worked security actually to get in to, into a clique and I worked security at a place called vinylized in like 94, late 94 and they were starting a drum and bass night and I was checking IDs and doing pat downs at the door and wanted, you know, I’m 10ft from the turntables, I wanted to be on the turntables.

I met those guys and said hey I, I play hip hop too.

I could play the front room, I wanted to play the back room but you know they had their crew established already so I started in the front playing hip hop and breaks just so that I could lean into becoming friends with them and, and then eventually joined them.

And that was my drum and bass crew for you know, a nice 10 year stretch.

What was it like doing the doors of the drum and bass nights?

Because I know there’s times in England when drum and bass nights have been very heavy and very moody.

I don’t know the exact areas of it.

Yeah, yeah it was, it was, it definitely had a different temperature in, in the States.

I think it was a little bit more close, closer, related to rave culture.

And so you did get still a lot of people that just like pure anything electronic and, and you know, drum and bass had a little bit more of an edge to it and you could tell from the people that were, that were leaning into it that they were a lot different than, than you know, pure ravers or whatever.

And so this was an all ages club and so I think until it you know, graduated to a 21 and over crowd, it definitely was a funner, younger like vier crowd.

We didn’t really have too much, too much issues at all.

So how come we became over 21s?

Was that to do with liquor licensing?

Yeah, basically we all grew up too.

And so we all just said, you know, do we want to continue doing all ages stuff?

Like yeah, we could support that, you know, via underground parties.

But the, the, the other thing was we wanted it to grow up with us.

We wanted that music to come to be a little bit more mainstream and the only way to do that was to plug it into a weekday night and then build off of it.

So were you doing any promoting at that point?

Big time.

I mean that was, I mean that’s a catalyst of sort of seeding any of this stuff in, in any city too.

I think the other thing too is like a lot of people nowadays don’t understand a lot of those origin stories where you just show up and, and plug in your computer now and dj.

Where before if you were going to be playing a party, you were, you know, going hand to hand with flyers or putting them in car windows weeks out to get people.

And so if you were a DJ then you had to bring your crew of people anywhere you were playing, where now it’s pretty much a little bit more passive.

And oh yeah, I got a flyer.

Let me just share the flyer on social and, and hope people show up.

But I mean you literally had to show up with your crew and that helped establish a little bit more, you know, respect that.

Like, hey, I know not only could play this music really well, I’m helping build this party up.

Yeah.

So did you ever go into any new venues to set up new nights then?

Yeah, we did it all the time.

I mean we were playing in sushi restaurants, Cuban, Cuban restaurants, turning them into clubs, piano bars into clubs, just anything, anything in everywhere where we had a contact or you know, coffee shops.

You know, we, we’ve got a coffee shop that is still close to my office and every time I walk by it I’m like, I used to play there on a Thursday night upstairs in the smoking section for two hours for a couple free cups of coffee.

And then you know, the secondhand stores that I had the relationships with, I’m like, can I come in here on a Saturday and play some music?

And they’re like, I don’t even know how that’s going to work.

Don’t worry, I have the pa.

I’ll bring all the stuff in.

And so we created that sort of in store experience which then became like, oh, I love this.

What do you play anywhere in town?

Here’s our flyers.

And so that was like an in store promo from hip hop probably.

We leaned on it to, to make, create that into Sort of a club thing, a club promo.

Right.

So you were going to places for free, basically.

Yeah.

Because you knew that you would get that promotion from it in that potential footfall into your nights.

Yeah, yeah.

I think there’s a lot to be said for DJing free at the right times.

Definitely not all the time, because sometimes someone’s getting a load of money out of you, but there’s certainly the times when you know that it forms part of a wider end game and it, and it can really help you.

There’s loads of gigs I’ve done for free and my mum said, oh, you’re getting paid for this one, and didn’t seem to have the kind of vision because they think, well, you’re giving up your time for nothing.

And it’s like, that’s not for nothing because it’s going to come back and pay me back eventually.

Yeah.

You know, with your network with, with me, it’s helped with all sorts of things.

With my job, for example, without getting into any details, it’s like helped me set up a lot of my creative network that I work with.

Things like that.

It’s got me working.

So, you know, it’s done good things way outside of DJing.

Yeah.

And I think, I think the, the area where it’s not, you know, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t tell anyone to work for free ever.

I think, you know, you’re, you’re creativity and everything has got so much like face value on it, but when you’re involved in that building process, it’s different.

Right?

Yeah.

And so, like, if you really want a club night to go or.

And then a lot of times if someone would come in and I, I feel like it might be a request coming in where it’s a favor before they even get uncomfortable asking for free service.

If I like them and I want to like, you know, lean into their project, I just let them know, hey, this pro bono, don’t even worry about it.

And then you could see that, like you could see their energy going, oh, that was literally my next question.

But you just helped me get through that.

And so, like, I think as creatives, like, you’ll know where you could be network building and where someone’s taking advantage of you.

Yeah.

And that’s a big thing that I’ve always, I’ve learned that because been on both sides, right.

I’ve, I’ve been the promoter that’s trying to get a night, kick a night kicked off and I can’t pay everyone what they are worth at the time and you know, circle, you know, having a lot of those people around you that understand that is so important when you are basically getting started.

And this is maybe another thing where you’ve been able to, you said about having that skill about kind of bartering with people.

It’s almost like communication as well, isn’t it?

You, you can understand the benefits for other people of things that maybe helped you in terms of getting people on your team squad, whatever you want to call it, that will, will take that step with you and say, okay, yeah, we’ll do this.

Because it’s part of, part of Brian’s vision.

You know, we buy into this and we know there’s a benefit for us long term as well.

Yeah, I mean, I still have a lot of the same friends.

When I would, when I moved here in 94, on the community side, like I ran into two or three different B boy crews and we’ve done the clubs, the club nights together jams, you know, I did, I did an event when I first moved to Seattle, a B Boy event.

And I had, of course, right, I had my sound system, so let’s take it to the Seattle center, do a B Boy jam.

And I brought in all the DJs at the time that I saw on flyers.

And you know, it was, it was a community oriented event to like, you know, B Boying had, had gotten a resurgence in that time period.

And then in it, the energy felt so good because it was like These kids were 15, 16 years old and they were into B Boy culture.

And I was like, wow, that is something that I’ve missed for 12, 15 years at the time.

And so I invested my energy into like, hey, I’m going to go and play with them at the community center, offer my DJ services up for free.

Because I just loved that there was another sort of cultural movement that was very similar to my childhood.

And you know, it happens probably all the time, right.

But there was a, literally a pin.

I felt like right now at this time B Boy culture is going to come back the same way that like turntablism like died for, you know, eight, 10 years.

And then you’re like, I hope all those guys that were in that culture are still okay.

And some of them sprouted back up and did club gigs and some of them couldn’t figure out how to, you know, like, like party rock and and were very, very drilled down into just, you know, scratching and being a turntablist.

And so that’s another movement that I followed, you know, all the ups and downs of too.

So it sounds like you were DJing a lot then.

Yeah, I, I feel like it was totally full, full on consuming me.

I was, you know, weekday.

Weekday gigs take its toll on you, you know, and these were weeklies and then weekend parties, and then we were going through.

We were doing a lot of raves and underground stuff.

And in the States, it wasn’t too crazy to have Pharcyde playing next to a drum and bass dj.

Right.

Or, you know, and, and, you know, Qbert or someone like, you know, on.

On the Ticket.

And so there was like.

That was really cool to me because it was like, oh, this is not at a normal club.

This is an underground event and I’m still getting to see some of my hip hop stars and also playing drum and bass.

And, you know, it got to the point where a lot of those parties were leaning it.

So this is back to your point of like, was it a.

Was it a rough scene or whatever?

We didn’t get booked for a lot of underground events because I think they were trying to keep it very, you know, techno trance, house party vibes.

And the drum and bass had, you know, the camo netting.

And we, you know, we’re all, we’re all a little bit rough and tethered.

And so we would just go in to parties with our record cases and, and walk up to whoever was DJing and telling them that we were next and just knocking people off their sets.

And we did it over and over again through, you know, through a couple years until they gave us our room and asked us to stop doing that, you know, and, and then we had the drum and bass arena in the room and, and, and, and then they started booking us and everything.

And so we would literally, if it was a breakbeat dj, we’re like, that’s kind of adjacent close enough to our music.

And we’d be like, hey, bro, I’m on in like five minutes.

And.

And, you know, I can’t believe you got away with that over and over and over again.

But we bring our whole crew.

Yeah.

So there wasn’t like, oh, you know, there wasn’t an argument or anything.

It was just like, oh, I must have been misinformed.

These guys are up next.

And then we would just all, you know, back to back our records until we got kicked off.

So just going back to college.

What did you study at college?

Chemistry.

Right, okay.

Yeah.

So did you at any point do anything with that afterwards?

I know you said you didn’t work for the first two Years.

Yeah.

In Seattle.

Yeah, I had, I had a job at a biotech lab working third shift maybe for about a four or six month stint.

And a guy that I worked with, Norman Clark, we became friends over music.

Were just in a, in a clean room environment where you couldn’t touch your face for your entire work shift.

And we would listen to Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter cassette tapes and Miles Davis cassette tapes and just auto reverse them at, at the end and then have to go back through the clean room schedule to, to, to, to have the room sanitized again, just to flip the cassette tape.

But we became friends and quit on the same night and made a pact that if either of us got a better job that we would hire the other person.

And so he got a job at a, at a tech company that was like an online dating company at the time.

And I was working at Home Depot and he just said, hey man, I’m literally the, the manager here.

You could come in and just work with me.

And I was like, nah, I’m winning the ping pong tournament here.

Like I’m good, but call me back in a couple months.

And then I was in tech from that point on.

Right.

What, what was the tech scene like then?

Because that’s, that’s just before the bubble,.

Is it, it’s way before it’s pre Google.

I mean it’s like, you know, you, there was seven search engines.

It was like AltaVista, Lycos, HotBot, LookSmart, ASG, Yahoo.

There was no Google.

And so we, we, it was pretty, pretty wild I would say.

I, I felt like there was like only a thousand businesses on the Internet at the time.

You couldn’t add something to a shopping cart.

You know, everything was like authorized at the end of the day.

And so when we would have transactions go through, I’d have to send a batch through at like 5 o’ clock to get our credit card stuff.

And everything was manual data entry to FileMaker Pro and we were using Eudora for our email.

It’s just a whole different time period than what people in tech are used to today.

We still DJing a lot when you DJing.

And I was sleeping in my office on a, in the middle of the week on a, on a Wednesday night, going to DJ, getting done DJing at four in the morning and then having to be at the office by 7:38.

And so in between my DJ sets I’d go up to my office which was Right around the corner from my gig and just sleep on the floor underneath my desk and then come back down to finish my set at from 2 to 3 and then go back home to sleep a couple hours.

Was that all in secret or did or did people not care then?

Was it quite any.

Was it quite an easygoing industry to be in or.

Easy, yeah, super easy.

And I mean to the point where I would even sleep behind the DJ booth and people would wake me up and to get on because it was every single week for, for years.

And so, you know, it was like you could do that a couple times a month, but you just can’t do it forever or you’ll get caught up and, and you know, it’ll.

It’ll eat you up and spit you out.

So I just made sure I still had the day job, the balance.

I was renting my sound system out at different clubs, and so that was extra income to just buy records.

Just, just keep on, you know, building, you know, building my collection and also just staying, staying in contact and in network with different club owners and promoters.

What sort of work were you doing at the tech company?

Internet marketing.

Literally the same job I have today.

Right.

So we were doing a lot.

Was it more of like the creative and copywriting and things like that, or was it more heavily analytical?

A little bit more analytical, which is why that chemistry degree came into play.

Yeah, it’s.

The chemistry degree to me at that point was almost like a business degree.

It was like, here’s, here’s what’s happened in your ad campaign.

Now go figure out why it was successful or why, why it didn’t work.

And I had to go through the numbers.

Was it quite nice having the opposition of a very kind of creative rolling the DJ in and then having a very analytical role in the day job?

Was it like, nice to be able to just fully engage one and then fully engage the other?

Yeah, yeah.

Well, I mean, I, I looked at them as one in the same because everything was so new back then that you just had to figure things out.

Right.

And so if you didn’t know how something worked, you.

You literally, you couldn’t go to YouTube or go to a web forum.

I mean, there were web forms, but they weren’t doing, you know, helping you figure things out.

And so you just were like, okay, I can’t.

I can’t get Google to see my website or I can’t get Yahoo.

What are they doing?

And then you just went and tested and figured things out until.

And then you’re like, Ah, that.

So it was like cracking the algorithm before.

The algorithm.

Yeah.

That’s like a lot of reverse engineering, isn’t it?

Yeah.

And then, I mean, look, we had to do it through all through the years of, of friends during MySpace and figuring out how, like how, okay, now how do we promote and how do we get people to do this?

And, and I feel like a lot of hip hop is like cracking the code, like trying to unpack things and, and repackage them and, and figure out like, okay, now this is the new way of doing a promo and this is a new way of getting people to your event.

I think even in terms of production as well, you think about people that are sampling now, say like an Alchemist or whoever, they’re still sampling in the way, say, I don’t know, a Large Professor was sampling, made his first album.

But whilst they’re still using the same technology and things, there’s very different ways they’re engineered and ways they’re packaged.

It’s like you kind of reinterpret something with a slightly different twist on it.

Yeah, I mean we’ve got a lot of producers here in town.

We’ve got Jake One, Vitamin D, Bean One.

All these guys are here in Seattle doing a lot of old school production.

They’re still using ASR-10s and MPCs and, and you know, another, you know, analog keyboards to do to make the music the same.

But I think the, the, the part where it evolved was they realized that like the sampling obviously is, you know, with WhoSampled and all these websites and everything.

Everyone’s been called out on, on, on things that they’ve flipped or samples that they flip.

They’re going in and doing their own live recordings, selling their own beat packs, selling their own drum kits.

And so they’re, they’ve hacked the system.

It’s a very hip hop thing to do.

Right.

And they’re like, okay, well we could keep on clearing samples and doing all the stuff that we’ve done traditionally, but we also could just get all this stuff live drummed and then we own it.

Yeah.

And so, so I mean I, I don’t know a lot in the production side, but I just love watching the evolution and you know, because I’m an old school head, I also like seeing stuff come back around and the cycles returning to like.

And I feel like that’s happening right now with a lot of music production is that the, the, a little bit of boom bap is coming back into a lot of production.

I just love seeing that that it’s like, it’s like, go ahead and evolve music.

We want to see that.

But also bring some stuff back so that people could realize that like, oh, this.

There was.

There was something before we got into like, everything sounding the same.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Or earlier.

Yeah.

And they.

They just won’t even look forward.

I. I like things where they’ve.

Where they hark back to boom bap, but just, Just do it a bit differently.

But I think even, even like lyrically things evolve, don’t they?

So you might have boom bap style and boom bap delivery, but there’s just something a bit different.

Just a slightly modern take on lyricism as well.

Yeah.

I mean, the cadences now, it’s like they could walk around beats and.

And talk through stuff that we would have never tried to pull off back in the day.

And actually, I like it.

You know, it’s like, it’s kind of amazing that someone could take something that I. I feel has been flipped so many times already and still have something new.

Yeah.

You can’t imagine Earl Sweatshirt or Action Bronson being around in 88.

No.

How that would have been taken in.

It’s a perfect example.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So when you were working in that tech role, were you staying in the same position or were you going up the career ladder?

Yeah, yeah, no, I was going up the career ladder.

I think at the time I had a digital marketing manager role and then a VP of online marketing at uDate.

And then I was going out to England one week out of the month for a couple of years and taking the trip up to Derby and really, you know, getting exposed to a lot of early UK hip hop, or what I probably thought was early UK hip hop.

And I was just buying any, any and every record I could get my hands on that was UK Hip hop because it felt like drum and bass at the time was going down, you know, the, that scene.

What took a little dip with.

With garage and a bunch of other.

And grime movement.

And a lot of those producers were going left and right and.

And I had also at the time had leaned out of the scene.

And then when I heard UK hip hop, it was very reminiscent, what we were just talking about of like an older sound that I missed.

You know this 96 hip hop, really dirty samples and grimy and not too cleaned up and too polished.

And I just missed that sound.

And I feel like, you know, all that early British hip hop with Task Force and, and, and, and all those crews really, really got me, got me perked up and interested.

So I was buying, buying records on Suspect Packages.

I had, I literally had a package come to my house every, every other week.

Yeah, I think there was a lot of it with that era.

There was a lot of DJ Premier and Diamond D influence a lot.

Yeah.

So.

Because I was gonna, I was gonna ask you if, if like the building the career, like, what sort of impact it had on your DJing.

Did you still DJ as much in that time?

No, I didn’t really come back.

I was doing more promoting actually.

Right.

Yeah, I, I turned a little bit more into community building.

Like there was like a gap, a cultural gap of like this.

Nothing’s really happening in the clubs.

We’re in between the, you know, 21 and over in all ages time period.

But we’re like, I, I just need something to, to, you know, get reinvigorated.

And I, I think it was, you know, basically the Mobb Deep era music and, and early Jay-Z stuff that just like, I was like, oh, let’s, let’s get this back in the club now.

Because that was dance music.

Yeah.

For a, you know, period of time.

It was like people were going pretty, pretty bonkers for, for that music in the club, which was super exciting to me because it wasn’t, you know, it wasn’t corny.

So you’re playing a lot of Neptunes then as well?

Neptunes, you know, hit pretty, pretty hard maybe two to three years after that for us.

Like, you know.

Right.

That.

Then it, you know, then you could call it jiggy era or whatever that it.

Where things got a little more bouncy and then, yeah, it was a little less boom bap and a little more bouncy.

And then, then it was, it was okay because then we just saw music going, you know, going up and down and, and as long as it still felt threaded in like, you know, what we would call, you know, core hip hop, then I was okay with being back in the club again.

Yeah.

So I suppose doing more of the promoting, does that kind of sit in with the day job a bit more as well?

Yeah, I mean, I was traveling A lot, obviously.

And the, you know, by then we, you know, we had a huge network here locally.

And so I think collectively a lot of people all wanting everything in Seattle to be fresh.

And so there was a lot of good DJs coming out.

There was a lot of old school DJs that had continued just holding down the scene even during the lull periods.

And so, yeah, I think that that was, that was a time period that like, you could be a promoter or DJ anything and you were all kind of doing everything in line with each other instead of competitively.

Yeah, that’s, that’s really nice because I think a lot of times that people won’t quite have the altruism and that true passion to build something for everyone.

It’s hard.

I think it’s maybe quite a unique thing that you found there then.

People that wanted to build for each other, not just for themselves.

Yeah, I mean, a lot of collaborations.

I mean, this is.

Remember this time period around maybe 08, brands wanted to align themselves with club culture.

Liquor companies and energy drink companies, and just everyone that’s coming around, Nike and Scion car companies, everyone was trying to align themselves somehow and they had to go to where there was audience mass.

And a lot of times those are club nights where you’re just like, you’ve got, oh, we’re going to do a release at this club night we’re bringing in, we got a sponsor to pay for, you know, DJ Shortkut to come up and play our club night.

And all those collaborations really rehelped, build that community piece.

And the, you know, the, the decades of people being promoters, then you had that trust built into the system too.

Like you remember the time where there was just overnight promoters and they would just show up and disappear as fast as they came.

And we got rid of them all, right.

A lot of them were there for the wrong reasons.

And I think that in Seattle you.

We saw we could count the promoters that we trusted on one hand and then those are the people that you aligned yourself with and, and in the clubs that they belong to had more longevity.

Same thing, right?

Like, man, that was such a fun club night.

But they had no control over the crowd or they had no control over whatever it was, or they had bad security or bad staff or whatever and they would die.

And so then when those club nights died, a movement died at the same time.

And so we learned so much from so many of those mistakes that we said.

And in order for this thing to keep going, we have to make sure the right players are in place.

The right DJs are on those rosters so that the music stays consistent, that people know what to expect when they’re showing up.

So when you get in all these corporate sponsorships, then, and that sort of thing, was that an opportunity to get a nice bit of money in for the guys that had been there throughout everything?

God, yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, it was literally that.

It was a payback of like all those gigs that you had done for us for like 2, $300 when you should have been getting paid a thousand, fifteen hundred.

Those checks just got signed over as much as we possibly could.

Because at the time I was a club owner in 08 and so I had my own, my own club.

You know, we were bringing through all of our favorite DJs, onboarding, all of our favorite promoters, and, you know, we, we pulled over the club nights that, that were, you know, really near and dear to a lot of people’s hearts in Seattle and brought them into our club.

We brought over drum and bass nights, the Yo sun world famous Saturday night with DV One and 4Color Zack and Soul 1 and B Mello, and just all these DJs that were like, you know, early, early development DJs that supported the scene in the community for years and years and then just made them the residents of a lot of those nights.

Let’s just rewind a minute there.

Yeah, so you’re working in tech, you’re building your career, you get into like VP roles and you buy a nightclub.

Yeah.

So I remember there was like, those companies were getting acquired, and so then uDate got acquired by the IAC, which was match.com.

I got, I got a paycheck there.

I could have bought a house, condo, whatever I bought.

Opened up a club with one of my partners, and then we opened up a hip hop barber shop, we opened up a art gallery, and we opened up a screen printing company.

All the things that make the ecosystem run.

And we sold the barbershop to the barbers.

We realized that we didn’t have any business in the hair business.

We were probably selling more bootleg CDs than we were doing haircuts.

But, you know, we had Space Invader.

We had like all, all of our favorite artists there at the art gallery during that really cool time for a lot of, a lot of the urban art movement stuff.

And, and then we had the screen printing business.

You know, same thing.

We shouldn’t have been in that business.

But we got a Lot of relationships out of that business.

The Barbershop seeded so many relationships that I still have to this day for a business that never paid a dividend was probably the most important business that, that I’ve ever touched.

Just because of the network.

Yeah.

So the guy that had on the first episode, Ynot from Miami, he worked in a print shop and he said he, he got a really good network from that because that was just in the days that people were just still printing out loads of flyers.

Yeah.

So he’s interesting where these networks come from.

Yeah.

And I mean we had our flyer guy too, that was in Portland and, and I mean, you know, we talked to.

I would probably talk to that, that guy more than anyone else industry wide.

And he, you know, if he could.

We were greyhounding flyers up.

He was printing them and we were picking them up at the Greyhound station 12 hours later.

And then going from Greyhound right to the clubs for shows that happened in two days.

This is the only way to get messaging out.

So did you have someone on the Greyhound with the flyers?

Then we would literally have to go.

We knew when the, the bus was coming up and, and soon as it got to the, you know, got to the Seattle station, we would just go down there and say, yeah, under the needle records, we got flyers in and then, oh yeah, got your box right here.

And they were literally felt like they were hot off the press.

And then we would just shoot downtown and, and all the promo teams would, would, would grab flyer packs and then we just blast the city with them.

That’s crazy.

So is the club still going?

I, I got a different club.

That one got sunsetted maybe about five, six years.

It was, you know, our clubhouse.

We, I literally almost lived there.

But we, we got hit with the city, hit us with an opportunity to dance tax, which was like some weird tax that was created in the 80s for like Jazzercise classes to tax jazzercise classes.

And because we had a capacity over 50 and had amplified sound and a dance floor that we had to pay a back tax that, that pretty much crushed us.

And then they, they was.

There was a nightclubs that were.

The people were getting crushed with fires.

And then they required.

Had a sprinkler system requirement from the city that, that crushed us.

And so it literally was just like one thing after the other that was a little bit more driven from city politics and economics than it was our, our, you know, lack of pursuit to have that, that, that club live on longer.

All this stuff that you’re telling me, I’m just Thinking about having.

Whether we’re talking about the day job or everything else, I’m always thinking about the fact that you had the other thing at the same time as that.

So having a club that the city are doing their best to shut down, basically, whilst having quite a high senior sort of job in tech that must.

And going through tech boom and bust and all the other challenges, that must have been a pretty intense time for your mental health, like stress management.

Yeah.

And I think that.

I mean, it’s interesting you brought.

Just brought that up, like, at the time, I think the thing that helped us not identify or even look at mental health was we just went on to the next thing.

Right.

We just kept our mind busy to avoid the complexity of trying to address any kind of mental health.

And so then I opened up another bar with my partner and invested in another club, invested in an ice cream store.

You know, just kept on moving and moving so that I didn’t have to slow down enough to stop and go, wow.

You know, like, that’s a lot that I just went through and.

And I never processed any of that stuff.

And so I think when Covid came around, man, I got smacked in the face.

Like, I’ve always been like, I don’t have any mental health issues.

I’m good.

I’m just a really happy person.

But when I slowed down to zero, I was a. I was just a wreck.

I was like, where’s my people?

Where’s my network?

Why.

Why am I sitting at home?

You know, I’m in my studio right now that I built during COVID because I just needed to be able to connect with people.

And.

Yeah, so, I mean, that was that.

I mean, you say that, but I.

It didn’t have.

There was nothing like, yes, I was busy.

Those tech boom, those tech bus people were getting laid off, all this stuff.

But we just kept going.

We just kept pushing through it.

And that protected.

That.

That somehow was a protective shell away from identifying.

Like, actually, I’ve been compiling a lot of anger and.

And having a bunch of stuff that, you know, during COVID I went and got a therapist for my.

My anger management.

Yeah.

And I thought, wow, that.

Get a therapist.

That you must be like a crazy person.

But no, man, it’s probably the best decision I’ve ever done.

I often don’t recognize stress until I kind of observe that I will have done a certain thing that makes me realize I must be stressed.

Like, there’s certain things I’ll focus on and blow out of all proportions that make me Then realize I must be stressed rather than me just being able to identify the feeling of being stressed.

Probably from that old school mentality.

If you think, right, I’m just going to internalize everything and like you say, divert attention elsewhere.

Yeah, it is old school mentality and we, we say that, you know, our generation and other generations just, just dealt with it.

But I think that that’s just very topical surface level stuff.

I don’t think anyone dealt with it.

It wasn’t like we had tougher skin.

I think we just didn’t realize that there was something that could be done to get rid of it or to make it better or you know, to identify like, oh, I, I’ve got all this packaged up bad energy and my release is XYZ and I’ve had that, you know, and I’ve always been like, oh, you know, like, don’t mess with me.

I’m.

I have a, I used to literally describe myself as having a quick fuse and thought that was okay and, and I’ve external, externally said that, oh, you know, I just got a quick fuse and then was like, oh, that’s just me.

That’s how I’m wired.

But it’s not how I’m wired.

Yeah.

So just going back onto your timeline then.

Yep.

Did you start to miss DJing?

Yeah, of course.

I think because all the while I, I never stopped buying records.

You know, I’m up to 7,000plus records.

I was just in New Orleans last week buying a bunch of records.

I had records shipped here.

I came home to records arriving and I, and I a supposedly retired DJing six months ago.

So yes, I missed DJing and I missed DJing then.

And I think it’s the thing that pulls me, it’s the gravity that pulls me back into the scene and I’m trying to always unpack again, using that word that like unpack like where I could participate and be, you know, beneficial.

You know, am I a mentor now?

Should I start a music festivals?

Do I open up another club?

Do I start DJing an all vinyl night?

Like all these things run through my head every other day.

So do you not DJ at all now then?

I’m, I’m DJing.

Like I, my retirement was, I retired from Club DJing to give myself a mental break from having to play Bad Bunny five times in a night.

It, it’s, it certainly takes its toll, doesn’t it?

Yeah, the late nights and like you say, dealing with a certain type of people, dealing with certain type of request playing certain types of music, certain songs that you don’t want.

It’s.

There’s a certain type of person that can keep doing that as they get older.

I think something that we’ve not talked about then is, is family life.

Because I believe you’ve got kids, haven’t you?

Yeah, yeah, I got an 8 and a 12 right now.

Yep.

So what was the impact on everything, I guess, of having.

Having the children?

Because you, for someone who’s not got kids to be having a busy day job and be DJing a lot and promoting, that’s pretty full on.

How, how does being a dad interrupt or change that?

I think, I mean, it’s nightlife, right?

And so.

Or a lot of it is nightlife.

And I think I just had a.

Been fortunate to have a great partner that understands sort of, you know, how I’m built, how I operate, how I move about.

And that’s been supportive through all my projects, whether they’re good ideas or bad ideas.

And she’s just basically given me this, I would say, an extended lifeline.

You know, a lot of my friends my age now aren’t going out, haven’t been going out to club.

I just went out this last weekend, we both did.

And, and I think that that’s probably the most important part is just having a little balance.

And I felt like maybe, you know, Covid aside in the, the last, say, 10 years, right, because my, my one daughter’s 12 years old, that I might have been not making the right adjustments to be around my family more.

And I think that, like, I’m having that reflection now, right, these days, now that I’m retired and I’m out of what I would just say giving my, my liver up for nightlife and I could wake up, I’m more responsible, my days are longer, my weekends are longer, I’m able to think about a lot more stuff because I’m not thinking about nightlife.

And you know, I still do the bookings for the club and, and I’m still trying to curate and get more female DJs in the mix, more, more diversity in the mix.

And I’m thinking about stuff like that now because I’m like also thinking about me as a, as a youth where I was trying to tap into where I might not have had opportunities.

And so.

And I also still am a music curator, even though I’m not there.

And so I go and listen to DJs, up and coming DJs and I listen to what they’re playing and try to figure out can I slot them in and have someone mentor them or train them to be able to take over these nights.

Because if you lose that, then the nights disappear and then the club disappears and then the scene disappears.

And so like I’m really, you know, I try not to be, but I know that I’m a gatekeeper at some certain point and it’s just who, it’s just who I am.

Your heart’s just so in it though.

You can tell from talking to you, like there’s so much passion for it all.

Yeah.

And you know, I’ve been, I was like reflecting with my friend that I used to dance that, that we used to be in the dance crew.

And he has a crazy memory, right?

Because his memory was us early clubbing.

And I could go and text him and I’m like, Manny, what was the name of the club that was in Morgan Hill that was, you know, it was more new wave and mod and, and they played hip hop too.

And he just remembers every single detail thing because he, he was only clubbing for that like five year period.

And it was.

And it just, it’s locked in, right?

The memories are all locked in.

And I’ve been clubbing from the mid-80s till last weekend and it’s all a blur.

So it’s hard for me to, you know, like put a, a needle in a haystack.

But yeah, it’s been just a, it’s been a lot of fun.

It’s been a, basically the foundation of my, my well being and everything is, you know, just having this community around and like minded people and the creativity that comes with it and so yeah, I miss it, but I’m still a part of it.

And what’s the day job?

Are you still in tech?

Still in tech.

Still doing the same job that I was doing in, in the mid-90s, but I have my own agency with partners and you know, we’re, we’re just buying advertising for a lot of big brands and some of our favorite companies.

You know, we try to do the same thing, align ourselves with companies that we like.

And so that’s been a fun ride.

But you know, I’m sure I’ll have a retirement here coming up in a couple years.

Around that side of the business too.

Has your network from DJing crossed over with your networking business?

Oh yeah, yeah.

I mean I do, speaking of like promotions, I, I also do a Seattle interactive conference.

It’s you know, 10, 12 years in now and it’s kind of like our version of a miniature South by Southwest.

And of course you know, my, my thing, it’s like it’s a tech conference with, you know, 100 plus speakers.

Over.

Two day period talking about creativity and marketing and communications and PR.

But it always has to have an after party, right?

And then after the after party, guess who I, who I book.

We’ve had, you know, Maceo from De La Soul, we’ve had Sir Mix-a-Lot on stage with us.

You know, we, we’ve literally tried to lean into as much cultural stuff as possible.

You know, we’ve had Stephen Powers come out from, from New York.

We’ve had Cey Adams, the executive creative director for, for Def Jam for, you know, over a decade, come out and do speeches because again, it’s like, I feel like so much stuff is so digital and people don’t have an origin story of like when things were analog.

And so I tried to find those people and, and I know they’re, they’re as passionate about their trade as I am of mine.

And so like, I want them to tell their stories so that, you know, if you’re developing identity or logo or something for your own brand or your company, if you’re not drawing stuff on napkins and using analog tools anymore, I mean, I see you have a pencil in your hand.

Like those things are really important to me because they’re process things and like everything has a process.

You can’t just jump to step nine and think that you’re going to complete a project correctly.

So with the advertising, this is probably just from my interest because of what I’ve done for jobs over time.

Is media buying a lot different nowadays?

Particularly since, since Web2 and with Social and with like influencer advertising and things like that.

Has that changed the landscape a lot?

Yeah, it has.

And so like I, I was in New Orleans at a media buying conference and it literally is like, where are we as an industry?

What’s on the horizon?

Where are we sort of doing takeaways and learning and leaning into.

And I think one of the biggest things that, that came away from that conference is that everyone’s really excited and afraid of AI and machine learning and where that’s going to go here.

I mean, you know, will you even need to write confidence copy anymore?

Or can copy just be written for you based on the history of the last three years in your industry vertical, the copy that is being, you know, collected in data mined on some server somewhere?

And so I think that the thing that we’ve, the way that we’ve positioned a lot of what we do now is that we do modern search, modern social, like that.

Those are like really key words for us now because it’s like it used to be hands on keyboard, right.

Having the, the right smart people that could take a look at data, analyze the data, make informed decisions on what to do with it moving forward.

And now we’ve got computers that could do a lot of that thinking and processing for us.

And so right now, today we’re leaning into the algorithm.

We’re letting the machines do the work that they finally are capable of doing and we are focusing more on creativity.

Like, how can we put a creative bend to what.

And provide the machines a better chance of winning, if that makes sense.

Yeah.

You’re selling a product online and we, and the machine already knows that user ABC like to purchase beanies on the Internet.

The machine learning is going to show them the ad and we don’t need to do that job anymore.

The job that we need to do is make sure that that beanie’s been presented with the right copy to that audience in the right time where it’s relevant for them.

That’s really nice though, isn’t it?

If creative can be the real focus.

Of all of a sudden it’s come back to the top of the stack.

And I’m excited about that obviously, because we’re all creatives, right.

And like have everything used to be we could turn the knobs better and now it’s creative could help the machine learning do better.

Yeah.

So I think with your mentioning of AI and things like that and versus creative as well, this is maybe what, what’s going to mean that AI can’t challenge music too much as well, because it can’t feel.

It can’t feel.

Wow.

You know, this is, I haven’t put a lot of thought on the music side other than my resistance around.

I mean, I just, I just started using Spotify within the last six months.

So I’m a very late adopter to technology that’s trying to tell me what to do and what to listen to and how to, you know, you know, I don’t need an algorithm doing music exploration for myself.

I feel like I’m the one that’s supposed to be doing, I’m supposed to be the algorithm so that people go, oh, what’s, what’s Brian listening to right now?

Oh, I’d never heard of that tune.

That’s great.

And then I curate from there.

Right.

And, and it’s a, it’s a, it’s literally a journey.

Right.

We, we’re trying to take people through A journey and, and also feed them.

You know, like I always tell DJs now, like, you’re not really doing your job unless you’re looking up and seeing how people are reacting to your music.

Like, you can’t be just playing the song that’s in blue because you played that song last time and it went over really well with the crowd.

So you literally got to be looking up in the room and feeding the different pockets of people.

And when you see someone vibing off your music a lot, you have to keep feeding them.

Not the whole night, but you got to acknowledge them, point at them, and then give them a couple more tracks.

Because that’s the algorithm they’re looking for.

Right.

They’re like, oh man, this, I haven’t heard music like this in so long.

Boom, I got you.

And then you move to the other side of the room and you do that and then the night builds and you see it, you see people get out of their seats and, and start doing the dance floor.

And I think that’s a lot of what’s lost right now is kids are so pre programmed into their DJ sets.

Yeah.

I think as well, with what you mentioned about Spotify, I still like going and buying records.

I DJ a little bit, not loads.

But the thing for me about going to a record show, I don’t often go to places that don’t have secondhand stuff because I want to go through secondhand, reasonable secondhand selections because I’ll just, I’ll find things I won’t find through browsing on Spotify or YouTube or Discogs.

I’ll see something go, that looks interesting.

Who’s playing on it?

They’re playing on it.

This looks like it might be yacht rock or this looks like it might be some interesting psych or whatever it is.

And, and it gives you that different experience of discovery music.

And that’s what I think can set you apart as well.

If you’re not going to be the most current, cutting edge sort of DJ or selector, then having some stuff that’s different, a unique selection, can kind of set you apart.

Yeah, yeah, I agree.

I fully agree.

I mean, that’s basically everything that I focus on is like trying to find something that not only is just new for just being new, but that I feel like I discovered it even if it’s already been discovered.

Like, wow, I had no idea this existed.

And then I’m going to make sure I include it in my next two sets.

Yeah.

Just so other people could go, oh, that’s a sample from that one song that is so crazy and just that little bit of recognition and then, and then I’m off to the next thing.

Yeah, and it could be really exciting as well.

I’m mindful of time now because we could go.

Go on talking for about another five hours, I think.

And just as a last point, then, what would be a key thing that you would advise someone either getting into DJing or a key, A key lesson that it’s taught you for life,.

I think, like more of a lesson for life is just to always be mindful of your.

The experiences you’re having along the way.

That like, you can’t always be looking only for the opportunities to open up, but you also got to turn around and, and help the person behind you and, and, and you.

Those come back in just massive dividends.

Like you’ll be really surprised when you start mapping your, your network and where you’ve gotten opportunities.

It’s also along the way, it’s the person that was behind you that, that might have snuck up and got ahead of you.

And then because you opened that door for him at one point in time, they’re there to open a door for you ahead of you.

And so I think that that’s probably been my biggest life lesson, is that the network is so important.

Keep it, keep it intact and, and, and you know, don’t come in and be a culture, a culture vulture, whatever you want to call it, but to just be there and show up authentically and, and people will appreciate that and you’ll have a lot longer life expectancy, whatever genre you’re.

You’re in, wherever, whatever, wherever you’re tapping in.

It’s just, just, you know, be mindful that there’s, there’s a lot of people doing it and you could be competitive, but don’t be a dick.

Don’t be a dick.

Yeah.

Amazing.

Where can people find you online?

Brian I.

My last name on most social media, so Rauschenbach, and my DJ name is Nostalgia B.

If you’re looking through the deeper parts of the webs, I’m starting to curate playlists because, you know, again, anti algorithm as much as my day job.

But yeah, Adam, I really appreciate taking the time and like, you actually got me thinking about a couple things that I don’t think I’ve thought about in a long time and some stuff that I probably need to think about.

So appreciate that.

Brilliant.

Yeah, thanks very much for your time.