Getting Decked
A few months ago and at very short notice, I was conscripted to ‘wax some grooves’, as we hipsters say, at the Gershwin Room at the Espy. A code red emergency had been declared: the regular DJ guy couldn’t make it. I didn’t ask why. You don’t, in circumstances like those. You just do the job. You don’t think of yourself as a hero.
About twenty minutes after I’d confirmed my availability, I was emailed a few more details about the evening. I would be starting at eight pm, which was a strangely premature hour for the venue, and I would be up on the stage, which was also strange, because there would be absolutely nothing to see except a guy flicking through CDs and drinking cider. And, obviously, in that case there would be no bands. No bands? Espy?
I only play CDs. I have no interest in spinning vinyl 45s of Sam and Dave when I can buy or accept the invitation to share a single soul compilation CD that has pretty much every sixties and seventies soul hit there ever was on it. Why risk the vinyl, anyway? I like my old records. So I don’t remix 50 Pence P Diddy raps. My audience is generally a bunch of over-thirty inner-city wasters who have just finished watching a band somewhere (not ‘HIGH RISK!’, presumably) and want to keep drinking. It’s a lovely way for me to make a few bucks (and I’m outraged at how little work I’m getting this year). But my audience weren’t going to be there to help me that night.
I still don’t know how it came to be at the Gersh, this function, but I found out upon arrival what it actually was. It was a piss-up for the St Kilda Road cops.
Uh huh … okay …
You can imagine how comprehensively foreboded with foreboding I was when I set myself up, in both senses, on the stage at the Espy with my expansive but inappropriate stacks of CDs.
I really want to like cops. I try, I really do. When they want to know my name for no apparent reason, I try to understand. That must be the protecting-the-community thing. When they push people against shopfronts for walking off the footpath, I wonder for a nanosecond whether it might perhaps have been an especially menacing kind of walk. Strolling with intent. I admit I’ve met some helpful and friendly, if dim, cops. I just have a bit of a ‘necessary evil’ (well, not necessarily necessary, actually, periodically just evil) attitude to the long arm.
The doors opened at about eight fifteen pm and in they flooded. Police officers most of them, I guess. I didn’t know who was who and who wasn’t, so I just presumed all of them were cops. In my mind, the girls in sparkly little dresses were as much off-duty old-bill as the boofhead boys up the back were. No reason why they wouldn’t be. On the occasions I’ve had dealings with plod I’ve tried to sort of flirt with any lady cops on hand. I’m sure you can imagine how successful that’s been.
Out of uniform, police of course resemble any old bunch of happy drinkers at a bad Irish theme pub. Except they don’t get too maggoted, and they don’t look for fights. Well, they didn’t when I was there. What a confusion that would be; off-duty cops breaking up a fight between off-duty cops, possibly over a female cop, also off-duty. And what would happen when hotel security arrived? Or off-duty hotel security?
For an hour at least, I may as well have played a CD of dogs farting, such was the absolute indifference of the crowd to the music. In fact, they wouldn’t have cared if it had been the same dog farting over and over again. They’d have preferred no music at all. I could have gone down to the beach for a walk.
So I drank cider and pleased myself with whimsical picks from my stash. Mildly esoteric a bit of it, but mostly stuff I’d hope readers of this website might dig: Television, The Roots, Laura Nyro, Franz Ferdinand, Stevie Wonder, The Undertones, Cheap Trick, T. Rex, Wings, The Sex Pistols, The Faces, Otis Redding, ZepWhoMacBowie. Late in the evening, some Engelbert Humperdinck, or something from South Pacific, probably ‘This Nearly Was Mine’. I love a list! You get the drift, anyway. The idea is to get, or keep, people dancing, so you try to follow whatever vibe is working and deal out more of the same. I’d get by, I thought, wishfully. Laughably.
Being up on stage enabled me to emanate a certain amount of shadowy detachedness (the sort of do-not-approach big-headedness favoured by chemists on their elevated mezzanines behind the counter) and I was enjoying that until I noticed tentative steps being made in my direction by the tippled early-onset handbag dancers. They clearly wanted me to play their favourite and, so far mystifyingly absent, song.
In theory, requesting a song is not necessarily a bad thing. But … just … don’t be a cock, all right?
Please don’t shout or argue with me because I don’t have your song. I don’t want a debate about it. Please don’t ask for a song when I just played it. Please don’t hang around the decks, hoping the name of that song you really like will pop into your head. And no, humming a few bars into my ear won’t help. Under no circumstances, NO CIRCUMSTANCES, should you jolly yourself into the DJ area and touch ANYTHING. These may seem like draconian measures but they are for your own good. A choice song respectfully requested? My pleasure.
I leaned over the edge of the stage and Handbag Dancer One shouted at me, ‘HAVE YOU GOT “FOOTLOOSE” OR “GREASE”?’
Somewhere in my gut, a gland in charge of nausea gave me a little squirt of protest.
With patience (and a measure of charm, I thought) I explained that no, I had neither of them, and by ‘Grease’, did you mean the song ‘Grease’, performed on the film soundtrack by Frankie Valli? Or one of the hits from Grease? Perhaps ‘You’re The One That I Want?’ Not a bad song, but possibly the last one I would play in my life. Actually, no; the least likely song that I would ever, ever play is ‘Footloose’.
So those girls gave up and kept dancing anyway, to ‘Miss You’ by The Stones, which is ace to dance to. On a par with ‘Footloose’.
But my ordeal was to escalate. A few of the party attendees decided they’d like a more participatory role in the song selection, and began to come upstairs to ask for laughably shit songs I didn’t have. Soon enough, a veritable conga line of dickwits was popping up to see me, one after another, like students being conferred degrees. Next. ‘Hi …GOT ANY CHOIRBOYS!?’
It’s the sort of question asked by truck drivers as they fill their tanks at a Shell petro-megaplex in Yass. And yes, they’ll have the Choirboys there, on one of those bourbon-sponsored compilation CDs racked up next to the counter. Me? No … sorry. I don’t have The Choirboys. What’s more, Mrs Police Lady, even if you saved me from a hostage drama in which I had been kidnapped and I had explosives strapped to my head and a detonator shoved in my mouth, I would still feel nothing but distaste for you. Goodbye.
The hours dragged on. I took a break when the time came for a raffle to be drawn, or confiscated grass to be divvied up or something. I found a microphone side of stage, plugged it into the PA and handed it to a cop who was probably pretty good with a gun, but an anti-talent at public speaking. He flapped the microphone around like a big sissy and nobody could hear a word he said. You’d hope he’d be better with a Taser. An ill-directed discharge of one of those could hit some woman in the belly and terminate her unborn child in a supermarket car park.
He did his mumbly thing and made a racist quip about Aborigines, as if that would make him and me all matey, and went back to his back-slapping cronies.
They suck the life out of you, these clanging encounters with the real world.
The barrage of requests progressed ceaselessly. Nobody knew what they didn’t like about the music, and none were able to point out what they thought would make it better. This made for a fair bit of pantomime as cop and guest alike juggled the air, shrugged and frowned, but failed in any way to articulate what the problem was. ‘Mate, haven’t you got something more … more …’ I knew what they wanted – they wanted FOX FM, MMM, Video Hits. But they never expected to have to actually describe music or differentiate between styles. They wanted music for people with no love or knowledge of music. Songs wedged between ads for mufflers.
Michael Jackson was greeted with half-hearted shrugs. The lovely Lily Allen failed completely. AC/DC worked, at least for the woman wearing the AC/DC T shirt.
Things got sillier still when a young blonde woman with paintballed orange skin, a caricature of the average bimbo you might normally see hanging off a footy player at the Brownlow, arrived to rescue me. She said her brother was a DJ and asked me what I was getting paid, so she could say her brother was paid more; said she had some CDs in the car; said she could sort it all out because she was especially qualified for this sort of thing. How could I argue when she proclaimed, with great earnestness, ‘It’s okay, I’m a copper.’
I tend to dwell in a weightily ironic world but she was nothing if not deadly serious. No smiles, no affability. Move aside, Grandad, the police are here. But that was fine by me. I was going to get paid either way.
So she tooled herself up with some discs from her car and managed to play a few songs that might have been more suited to the occasion, which had little positive impact on the crowd either. Then she began to moan that she couldn’t cue songs up because she wasn’t being fed enough monitor sound through the cans. (That’s what we call headphones – as I said earlier, I’m just incredibly cool). Yeah? Well, it’s working fine for me, Lady Nightstick. None of her discs were song-listed either so she started to struggle quite badly. Officer down!
Then, predictably, she just upped and quit the gig. The equipment was broken, of course, and it was all my fault. I was evidently failing on two fronts now, both in the choice of music and the performance of the hardware playing it. If the Heineken ran out, that would have been me as well.
I couldn’t have imagined I’d meet anyone else as depressingly stupid as her, but then I did something myself that wasn’t too clever.
I remembered I’d downloaded a few chart hits from last year, which were sort of ‘crossover’ and worked with my regular punters, so, before I’d given the situation adequate thought, I fired up ‘I Got A Feeling’ by The Black Eyed Peas. Biggest selling song of 2009, I believe, and a sweet slice of pop/rap/funk. Good record. Nice at the time. Don’t think I ever want to hear it again but it was a winner at the Gersh, of course. The dance floor was suddenly pulsating with girls dirty dancing, and guys who looked like they were doing stretches at footy training.
Then I played ‘Sex On Fire’ by Kings Of Leon. That went down a treat too. But that was the end of the music they liked. I’d run out after two songs and that just made them unhappier than ever.
And you know what? If I’d had maybe three more hours to prepare for the gig, I’d have been able to download every top forty hit of the year, and the crowd would have loved me. So, in hindsight, I’m glad I didn’t do that.
Eventually, the cops just gave up on me. The battle had been lost. Disc Jockey 1, Victoria Police 0. Let’s hear it for the good guys.
Better still, a really lovely couple (and god knows what they were doing there) asked me if I possibly had a Pixies song or two. In fact, I had many Pixies songs, and played about five of them in a row so my new friends could dance around the stage. You have no idea how popular this made me with them. Having shown me the very impressive Pixies logo tattooed on her lower back, the girl showered me with kisses and hugs as though I’d ridden in on a tank and liberated her from the Nazis. (Is it just me, or do girls who have lower back tatts that they can barely see, even in the mirror, get them so boys can admire the results close up? If you know what I mean.)
During that unexpected happy time, I was approached by a mousy-looking lady who I presumed would make another idiotic request, but was, in fact, a detective from the St Kilda Road complex who’d come to pay me. As she counted out the notes, I imagined it as hush money for some corrupt drug deal; a shush payment so I wouldn’t cause any grief. And, come to think of it, that is what I was being paid to do. To shut up and stop playing songs called ‘Where Is My Mind?’, ‘Wave Of Mutilation’ and ‘Monkey Gone To Heaven.’
As the final glorious cacophony of ‘Debaser’ faded and the Pixies set concluded, I’d pretty much managed to clear the room. It was a pleasingly premature end to the evening, arriving as it did an hour early. So, not only had I been paid for an hour more than I’d actually worked, I’d been given bonus money for an extra hour I’d agreed to put in if necessary. As if that was ever going to happen.
The next day I was asked by a buddy how the gig had gone. I told him that it had been tough, that the police had harassed me all night, been in my face, made me feel uncomfortable, treated me as nothing more than a common criminal.
‘Yeah? Typical,’ he said. ‘Probably smacked you about a bit too?’
‘Well … no, they didn’t do that,’ I confessed. ‘But I think they might have wanted to. And not just the women either.’
Michael Witheford’s novel ‘Buzzed’ is available on Amazon for $114. Seriously. His band, The TV Set, are playing sunny Sundays next month at the Town Hall Hotel in North Melbourne.
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